We talk, write, read and repeat daily. With so many written forms of communication around us, a lot is going on constantly- every hour, every minute.
But not all messages or words are as heavy as your ex-boyfriend texting you, are they? Or as scary as your dad asking you about the huge credit card bill. Some of them are plain simple boring, ignored machine fed messages.
Why does that happen? Why some messages resonate with us more deeply than others? If you read the title again, you will guess the answer. It is emotional undertonning- the powerful emotions attached to the message, sometimes too subtle to decipher, sometimes too loaded to answer right away.
Bloggers, social media fanatics, advertisers have been using this ‘emotional connect’ for years to trap the fish right into the net. That’s sometimes why you would choose a specific oil, a certain soap, an exact car, hell even namak!(salt).
And the smart(er) people now are also using these emotional connectors to reach out to masses. With the courage to show their vulnerability and the tools to allow it to reach to a huge audience in seconds, people load their tweets and posts and messages with such heavy emotional appeals that people are bound to take notice. This notice then becomes retweets, sharing and yes that endless debate in the comment section.
Now, if this sharing of problems is right or wrong, that is an internal battle we all have with our mind while posting the words. But what I want to know is that- has anybody ever received any concrete help? Has any weight-watcher felt slightly less uneasy with her body when she posted about being body-shamed online? Has any victim of sexual harassment felt comfort in the words of strangers telling her she will get on with life? Weren’t all means of emotional connectivity supposed to be offline?
What is this plethora of emotional messages doing on my feed then? Wasn’t social media just for sarcasm and maybe news? Well, NO.
Not only survivors of attacks, victims of violence or destruction, people from marginalized sections and coming from so many difficult experiences reached out to the unknown, and even helped them recover, even the police are in the loop now.
Police departments across the world have sat in their offices, with their devices in their hands and used their personal social media handles to save lives. They will reply to your tweet which mentions a theft case and tell you what to do, they will see the Facebook live video of an accident and reach the place on time, they will respond to your post on Instagram about being bullied by giving out the steps to counter cyber bullying. And what’s amazing is, this force is going beyond their call of duty to generate trust in the public and to give out correct information at the right time. It’s fast, it’s accessible, it’s decentralizing and it is happening.
So yes, use your humble phone with your emotional words and messages. Somebody will reach out. However dead humanity be, emotions still connect. Strangers will help save the cat stuck on the tree, people will show up for the social campaign and somebody will always respond.
