Evil eyes on Facebook
While we live in 21st century, our primal human emotions are still driving our expressions in the digital age
The writer is the recipient of the James A Wechsler Award for International Reporting and a graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. He tweets @Mbilallakhani
A series of recent conversations with friends led to a provocative insight: Pakistanis are increasingly worried about ‘evil eyes’ — or jealousy — when it comes to sharing status updates or pictures on Facebook. This is influencing how news about pregnancies, vacations and professional progress is shared. For example, a pregnant woman I interviewed for this article confided that she and her husband fought hard over sharing pictures that might reveal her pregnancy on Facebook. While pregnancy is an extreme case, the arguments over sharing remain the same. She wants to share her happiness with the world and celebrate life. Her husband and in-laws don’t want to risk it. While this behaviour isn’t new, the intensity with which it’s going viral forces us to pause and think about the unintended consequences for the future of social media and our real lives.
Social media was always criticised for projecting a version of our lives that was more ‘perfect’ than our actual lives. Depending on the size of your ego, there was a gap between who you actually were and what you projected yourself to be on social media. However, if folks are increasingly worried that their ‘perfect’ lives on social media will catch the ‘evil eye’ and cause even the imperfect goodness in their actual lives to be threatened, where does that leave the future of social media? What’s surprising is that it’s young people who are worried about this and not just parents, elder siblings and grandmothers, who were always worried about nazr anyway. This signals that young people are actually having bad experiences with social media sharing and nazr, which are significant enough to cause habit change. This essentially means all the ‘normal’ people will gradually reduce their sharing on Facebook, which will turn social media into the Wild Wild West where only stalkers and serial sharers with big egos (or a big message) roam and rule the jungle.
Enter keyboard warriors like Hamza Abbasi
Social media has come a long way in Pakistan. We started with ‘frandship’ requests on Orkut but evolved into having fairly serious debates in the lead up to the 2013 elections, when the security situation didn’t allow you to spar physically with competing rallies. What remained constant throughout this evolution of social media was the need for folks to share key moments in their personal lives with others, while commenting on key moments in the lives of their friends and family. This constant may not remain constant for long. Instead, a new way forward will emerge.
If you observed the social media skirmishes around statuses and videos from the likes of Hamza Abbasi, Faisal Qureshi and Jibran Nasir, you will see the emergence of a new form of sharing on Facebook. While the subjects are political, the discussions are very personal. This is going to turn into the new normal. As young people share less personal information on social media, they will paradoxically make broader political and social debates more personal and polarising. While the debate is good for Pakistan, the personalisation of policy discussions is dangerous (this is why we seek extensions for people rather than their policies). For example, take the recent controversy over whether/how we should celebrate Defence Day on social media. It’s important to encourage robust policy debates without getting personal. We can’t define the boundaries of patriotism by blurring the boundaries of civility on social media.
So where do we go from here? First, we need to stop brushing this conversation under the carpet. Almost everyone I talked to about social media envy felt strongly about this issue but no one wanted to come on the record with their name for this article. This is surprising because people come on the record when I write about polarising political or social issues. There’s a real taboo here because people feel this conversation comes with real consequences. Relationships are shattered, promotions are stalled and unexpected diseases are caught. Facebook is blamed. While we live in the 21st century, our primal human emotions — love, hate, envy — are still driving our expressions in the digital age.
In conclusion, a couple of predictions for the next few years. Facebook’s importance as a platform for sharing personal information will decline steadily. Enhanced privacy settings on Facebook and the use of other apps like Whatsapp group chats for sharing news with close friends will become more prominent. Facebook will turn into a more political, polarising and judgmental place. It will become the 21st century equivalent of the colosseum where keyboard gladiators like Hamza Abbasi and Fasial Qureshi duel, while the rest of us will cheer and bray for blood.
Published in The Express Tribune, September 10th, 2015.
Social media was always criticised for projecting a version of our lives that was more ‘perfect’ than our actual lives. Depending on the size of your ego, there was a gap between who you actually were and what you projected yourself to be on social media. However, if folks are increasingly worried that their ‘perfect’ lives on social media will catch the ‘evil eye’ and cause even the imperfect goodness in their actual lives to be threatened, where does that leave the future of social media? What’s surprising is that it’s young people who are worried about this and not just parents, elder siblings and grandmothers, who were always worried about nazr anyway. This signals that young people are actually having bad experiences with social media sharing and nazr, which are significant enough to cause habit change. This essentially means all the ‘normal’ people will gradually reduce their sharing on Facebook, which will turn social media into the Wild Wild West where only stalkers and serial sharers with big egos (or a big message) roam and rule the jungle.
Enter keyboard warriors like Hamza Abbasi
Social media has come a long way in Pakistan. We started with ‘frandship’ requests on Orkut but evolved into having fairly serious debates in the lead up to the 2013 elections, when the security situation didn’t allow you to spar physically with competing rallies. What remained constant throughout this evolution of social media was the need for folks to share key moments in their personal lives with others, while commenting on key moments in the lives of their friends and family. This constant may not remain constant for long. Instead, a new way forward will emerge.
If you observed the social media skirmishes around statuses and videos from the likes of Hamza Abbasi, Faisal Qureshi and Jibran Nasir, you will see the emergence of a new form of sharing on Facebook. While the subjects are political, the discussions are very personal. This is going to turn into the new normal. As young people share less personal information on social media, they will paradoxically make broader political and social debates more personal and polarising. While the debate is good for Pakistan, the personalisation of policy discussions is dangerous (this is why we seek extensions for people rather than their policies). For example, take the recent controversy over whether/how we should celebrate Defence Day on social media. It’s important to encourage robust policy debates without getting personal. We can’t define the boundaries of patriotism by blurring the boundaries of civility on social media.
So where do we go from here? First, we need to stop brushing this conversation under the carpet. Almost everyone I talked to about social media envy felt strongly about this issue but no one wanted to come on the record with their name for this article. This is surprising because people come on the record when I write about polarising political or social issues. There’s a real taboo here because people feel this conversation comes with real consequences. Relationships are shattered, promotions are stalled and unexpected diseases are caught. Facebook is blamed. While we live in the 21st century, our primal human emotions — love, hate, envy — are still driving our expressions in the digital age.
In conclusion, a couple of predictions for the next few years. Facebook’s importance as a platform for sharing personal information will decline steadily. Enhanced privacy settings on Facebook and the use of other apps like Whatsapp group chats for sharing news with close friends will become more prominent. Facebook will turn into a more political, polarising and judgmental place. It will become the 21st century equivalent of the colosseum where keyboard gladiators like Hamza Abbasi and Fasial Qureshi duel, while the rest of us will cheer and bray for blood.
Published in The Express Tribune, September 10th, 2015.