Every day, I find myself in the middle of two groups of people who are theatrically different -in terms of their online presence. The first group, mostly college friends and (former) coworkers, are those who carefully curate their LinkedIn profiles and maintain executive pages with a nicely erected headshot. The second group are the ones who fall into deep depression without their facebook posts.

I have personally embraced the online presence to a large degree. For instance, I have two facebook accounts. The first one is dead in terms of activity. I opened it literally a day after Facebook got liberated out of the college circle. Most of my college friends, former and present coworkers are connected to me via that account. The second account is more active. I use it to keep in touch with my close circle of friends.

Last week and during my flight from Seattle to SF, I connected an analyzer to both accounts to study the nature of the news feeds on each account. Counting by the number of ‘likes’, here are the most disliked feed themes on my dead account :

– 41% : Political messages
– 24% : Self Promotion
– 14% : Baby photos
– 13% : Pictures of partying
– 7% : Fundraising

The result on the second (active) account is much more interesting. Here are the most disliked themes on my personal account:

– 51% : Self Promotion
– 32% : Baby photos
– 10% : Pictures of partying
– 5% : Selfies
– 0.9% : Relationship status update

Measured by data, most of my close friends are apparently a bunch of insecure motherfuckers. Besides, can you imagine how much they talk about each other given these themes? That should be a very abutting experience if that’s what gossip does. One might assert, I am gossiping too -given the nature of this post. But at least I’m doing it publicly since most of my friends read this blog.

Mass emails, facebook posts and tweets are guilt-free ways to brag about accomplishments and acquisitions. After all, the sender doesn’t get true feedback on reader response, as most people know better than to respond angrily and leave a negative e-trail. One of the sad things about the one-sidedness of social media communication is that it allows people to live the fantasy that their mundanities and complacencies are anything but.

According to thousands of near death experiences or survivors, many of them faced a life-review. A full holographic display of moment to moment, since their birth to their death. What stood out in these reliving moments was that they were able to see the impact and ripples of their conduct, behavior, thought, word and deed, on not just on the person they spoke about, but also on those connected to that person. Now if this kind of knowledge was made public, people would pause before they went about talking ill about others. The ultimate matrix watches us and plays back to us every tiny thing we have ever done in our life, or in every life.