SINGAPORE: It’s 2012. You seat yourself upon your porcelain throne, and pull out your state-of-the-art mobile smartphone to tap on a blue app icon – either one with a little white bird on it, or one with a white “F” in lower case.
On your shiny touch screen, you type: “Taking a poop. LOL.” And you hit “post”, uploading it for the masses.
Several likes on Facebook, easily. A retweet or two from friends on Twitter. You glance at the last post you’d shared on social media – a picture of you and your family making funny faces over dinner, or an unfiltered thought that happened to cross your mind while waiting for the bus.
Now, instead of keeping you connected with friends and family, social media has become something of a cesspool for judgment and criticism.
Post something less than flattering? Several nasty comments about your weight, barely visible acne scars and slightly crooked teeth are sure to come your way from strangers you have never met who might not even live on the same continent.
Love to dance? RandomUser123 will comment on your TikTok video that you were a tad offbeat, your arm movement was not sharp enough – and you misspelt “choreography” in your caption.
You wouldn’t even need to be posting anything anywhere online. You could just be minding your own business only to find a photo or video of yourself on a random social media post made by a stranger with the caption: “Why would you wear this out?”
It’s become almost unbearable to use social media as everyone has to be perfect online now.
Slight tweaks to your face on an editing application and a colour filter to make things more aesthetic are the norm. Photos are well planned with specific angles used, and long gone are candid pictures and “unglams”.
But recently, one trend has breathed fresh air into the social media game, encouraging people to be unapologetically themselves: “We listen and we don’t judge”.
The trend involves friends, family or couples reciting the eponymous phrase – “we listen and we don’t judge” – before taking turns to confess embarrassing but harmless secrets about themselves, like using each other’s expensive shampoo or a child stealing their sibling’s expensive glitter gel pen.
