So much for whatsApping
As an advent follower of these technological trends, I am affiliated to several of them, including the highly trending whatsApp. I love its convenience and quick means to transmit messages and information, not to mention the assurance of message delivery, even when recipients decide to ignore or remain silent. It is a technology that has inevitably become a part of our lives and almost impossible to live with.
Here comes my dislike of this social entity. With it, group chats and associations have emerged so much so that every occasion and social gathering almost culminates in such. There are whatsApp groupings on gym membership, church congregations, Women’s Guild, Mai a Dorica, work associations, relatives, football fanatics, schoolmates, workshop participants, just to mention a few. The notion might be good with the core aim being the ability to communicate events, updates and mere greetings to many people at once. Trendy, I suppose.
But, people are different and so are their judgements or degree of interactions. There are those within a group membership who will post mainly leisurely stuff in form of nude or sexual photos and videos; jokes and try to bring lighter moments away from serious business. There also those who feel obliged to post anything ‘breaking’, fiction or non-fiction without a care to verify and feel heroic to be the first to inform. There are also the silent observers, who neither comment nor post. Also, there are those occasional posters or commentators, not forgetting the know-it-alls, who believe to be God’s gift to a grouping. In all of these, there is an element of irritation with constant beeps which are destructive and space filling. I know most gadgets have the provision of silencing particular groups to avoid the constant beeping, but this does little to stop the influx of unnecessary messages, whose senders do not hesitate to try and understand that not every member is up to stupidity.
Like I said, these groupings could serve a valuable purpose, save for the fact that because we differ, some of the annoyance outside their core purpose become offensive and time wasting. Some of them fill up inboxes with over 100 messages in a spate of 30 minutes, mostly with mediocre, fit for a bunch or members who have nothing to do and dance to the luxury of too much time on their hands. There will be those kkkks, lols, ikrs and all the codes slowly taking over the English language, in response to a posting. Worse still, most of these go on up to the wee hours of the morning, just for leisure. Some spend time discussing drinking sprees, politics, exchanging visuals and dissecting some of them to the point of how a particular bum shook and seemed fake. Multiple whatsApp memberships lead to a duplication of some photos, videos or gossip, which individual contacts, too, get busy posting the very same ones, clogging systems in the long run.
I don’t like it, period. There are a few decent ones I will tolerate and which may make sense, but will not stand unruly disturbances. I have already had enough of the nudity circulating, half truths or lies, sick jokes and unrealistic worldly happenings. Some people take the liberty to add you without permission. I love my friends, acquaintances and everybody that matters to my life, but please, spare me from these groupings.
An important message will always get to me if it should and haphazard groupings should not be an excuse. Let’s not get carried away by associating with just anybody, even strangers with just come across at seminars.n
