Recently I missed two important death announcements.
WhatsApp and Facebook etc, I thought, are really for fun and downtime. We visit them when we want to relax and wander a bit. Catch on to small news, enter into a friendly banter with some distant friend, watch some songs or jokes etc., but not really to look for something important. It is not like your phone text, or work email.
Our social media profile starts as a small excursion and before we know it, it grows into multiple fora, whatsapp, facebook, telegram, signal, tik tok, instagram and you know what. Over time you add or are added to multiple groups and chats. Then you start to skip here and there. You think you are still in control and are visiting the sites which matter, but not really.
It has become an alternate source of information for relatively more important news, an important event, someone to be in town, wedding and birth celebrations and death news. Still it was, to me atleast, not a not-to-miss platform for really important news. It happens all the times that you are reminded you missed something newsworthy. You got busy at work, at home or got engaged in some activity long enough to have unintentional "media-fast" and started missing important stuff.
Still I thought if the news is worth knowing, I would know it, directly from someone. Someone will pick up the phone to let me know what I should know.
But I was wrong. It happened to me at least two times in the recent past. A close friend's elder brother died after a short illness, He was someone I knew well growing up. No one informed me. A month later talking to another friend from Pakistan, the news was mentioned as if I already knew. I felt embarrassed, When I called friends who I think would have informed me, they thought I would have known. It was all over social media in the group of mutual friends.
Then there was the death of the father of a dear friend. I happened to know when I was scrolling up a chat group of classmates to look for a specific issue. It was full of posts of condolences. Everybody knew and perhaps thought that everybody else knew too.
Both times I was embarrassed when I finally made the condolence call. Grieving friends were gracious enough to ignore my delay in reaching out to them.
Attitudes change and we prefer to mass communicate instead of individual connection as we find it more convenient. It also tells you that a personal call to you may not be considered as important as you thought it did.
I have to find a new way to remain connected without being overwhelmed.
