Twenty years back, Mark Zuckerberg created a social media site and forever changed the ways of the world. In less than a year of its advent, Facebook added a million users and kickstarted a social media revolution, so to speak. Life has not been the same ever since. Today, life without Zuckerberg’s platforms is — albeit not impossible but — highly unlikely. You see, you’re reading this very post on a platform owned by Meta, co-founded by Zuckerberg.
Since Facebook has recently completed 20 years, we imagined what life would have been had Zuckerberg not created it. Truth be told, it would have been significantly different (for better or for worse). Here’s how –
1. We’d still be posting scraps on Orkut
2. Some of us wouldn’t even have found our current partners
3. Our sense of self-worth would exist outside social media
4. We wouldn’t have now realised that TyPiNg LiKe ThIS is cringe
5. Influencers wouldn’t be out there influencing
6. Relationships solely based on sending each other memes wouldn’t exist
Can you imagine?
7. Connections would be with real and actual people and not some followers we don’t remember
8. We wouldn’t know what Janhvi Kapoor was wearing to the gym
9. We wouldn’t know of the curious case of Orry who’s everywhere online
10. And we’d be relying on Stardust for Bollywood gossips
11. People might not have found their community if not for fandoms
12. You’d still be homeless, hunting apartments to no avail
13. People would still hate, but they won’t be as readable as every viral reel’s comment section
14. There wouldn’t be an online archive account for all your embarrassing pictures…OR THOUGHTS
15. We wouldn’t have been a part of activities with Angel Priya & 50 others
16. You’d be wishing ‘Happy Birthday’ to a lot less people
Cos you don’t remember any of them.
17. Social media could be enjoyed without the need of occasional social media detox
18. Your parents wouldn’t be pompously posting, congratulating you on every minute achievement of your life
19. Well, privacy may still have been a thing
20. And perhaps I’d be working somewhere else…
And scores of people like me who derive livelihood from social media would also be working somehwere else.
We may hate it, we may love it, but now the time is such we can’t live without it, the rabbithole of social media.