Orkut - does it rule your life too?. Review on Orkut

The world of ‘Orkutting’ has caught up with today’s GenX kids. It has become an addiction to most people and they proudly call themselves ‘Orkut addicts’. I am sure there is no one who doesn’t know what Orkut is all about. Orkut is just another community website used for social networking. What makes it so popular is the range of cool features it provides. I was introduced into the world of Orkut very early when there were very few members. I am not very much interested in ‘socializing and networking with all like minded people in this world’, as they call it. My membership was soon lost. Early last year, I was invited again to join the elite club of Orkut members by one of my friends. I criticized the whole concept of ‘socializing and ensuring waste of time’ and found myself at the receiving end since all my friends seemed to love the world of Orkut. I thought that there must be something in it that everyone’s hooked to it. I decided that I’ll take the plunge into the Orkut world and then draw my conclusions (which would at least not be called biased and ignorant).

Well, now that I have been ‘orkutting’ since more than an year, I can very well say that my opinion has changed but changed for the worst! Yes agreed, Orkut’s the best place to find all your long-lost friends from kindergarten to college. I met a lot of them who were not in touch with me. That’s one positive aspect. But that’s where it ends.

Here’s what you do when you get an invite from a friend who is already an orkut member. There is your profile which you fill unto oblivion. The more you fill crap into your profile, the more powerful your profile becomes! Your profile decides how cool or sexy you are. What your profile shows is not who you really are but what you want the world to see. The cool, sexy, mysterious, enigmatic you!!! Does one stop to question, “Is that really you?” ? I guess not.

Then of course you undergo the process of adding friends, replying scraps and adding your friends’ friends as your friends and finding out how many of your friends are friends of your friends and many such jobless things. You keep on adding friends, strangers who are called friends, etc until you have nearly hundreds in your friend’s list or more! Why, you look cool if you have that many friends! The ever increasing scrap count, fans count all form a topic of discussion where one friend takes a look at another’s fan count and wonders with jealousy how his friend can be more popular than him!

I have a friend who is an Orkut addict and once said that there was something lacking in his profile. Quoting him, “It’s just not cool enough”. I told him that that may be because he is not cool enough. He was furious with me and he went ahead and made his profile look cool. Unfortunately, my friend was lost somewhere in the all new ‘cool’ profile. Instead I found a stranger who liked things and had hobbies which were ‘in’ today.

There are communities to which you can become members. Except for a few who use these communities as forums for discussion, others add a whole list of communities just for the heck of it. If you are a member of a community of admirers of William Shakespeare’s works, you would look intellectual to all those who see your profile, wouldn’t you? But just being curious, do they even know anything about Shakespeare beyond “Romeo and Juliet’? I am sure many of them don’t.

Orkut is a world where the number of friends and scraps decide your status, the number of communities you are a member of show all the “cool” things you know about and the number of fans you have decide that you are the ‘happening’ guy/gal among all your friends. And of course, you can read all your friends’ scraps and mill the gossip about who is “dating” whom. It’s strange how people prefer to live their lives publicly and lay them open for all to see!! Finally there are testimonials. You ask people to write testimonials for you.. What the hell! Your friends write decorative testimonials which have nothing to do with you. Why, you would be returning the favour wouldn’t you?

Right this minute, when I am wondering why the world has come to this, there are millions of addicts logging on to orkut and living a false life. All I can say to all those people out there is, networking with people around the world is wonderful but not at the cost of losing your individuality.