Stop!

Think about this for a second.

Remember the last time you decided to be a partaker in the “FitFam” fad, and bought fresh groceries. You got pasta, Greek yogurt, bottled water, and a couple of fruits. Smiling to yourself after a successful day of spending your hard-earned Nairas, you decided to pick an apple and bite into it. The juices spilling into your mouth, you keep biting, enjoying the fruit. Halfway into the apple, you notice dark spots nearer to the core of the apple, indicating rot. Frustrated, you bin the apple and go on Twitter to blame the people in power for your pains. 

The apple simply represents the “forbidden” fruit we all ate at some point, and are still biting into – SOCIAL MEDIA. I remember being a young, impressionable young person in a saner clime of our Federation, walking down avenues in Maryland, with multiple shambalas on my wrist, a crinkled “Ama Kip Kip” tee, and a Blackberry Bold in my pocket. Then, it was amazing that technology had come such a long way and that we could easily communicate with people from other locations, all over the world with the “click-clack” of a few buttons. Early use of social media involved parents sending emojis in the wrong context on Whatsapp, gamers reviewing how to defeat the big baddies in triple-A games on Reddit, and in contemporary years, millions of people liking a picture of an EGG on Instagram. Yes, that last part is true. Just Google “most liked post on Instagram”.

While some of the earlier ways SM has been used were funny, witty, and even downright weird, the “rot” in the “apple” came after years of its use and has the potential to become a menace on occasion. For instance, cyberbullying in comment sections of Youtube, Twitter and Instagram has become so popular, that it has been given a nickname, “trolls”. Cyberbullying has even been so detrimental to people, especially celebrities and popular figures in society who have had to delete posts or content that made them targets of online harassment and trolls. A popular instance would be when Mohammed Salah, a football player currently an attacker for Liverpool FC, wished the world and his kids a Merry Christmas on Twitter, but people were voicing out the fact that Salah is a Muslim, and that his celebrating Christmas is wrong and unacceptable to the faith. He deleted the post.

Now, where do we go from here?

Do we continue to bite into the allegorical apple and ignore the rot?

Or do we bin the apple and proceed with our day-to-day FitFam living?

I would like to stress, however, the possibility that preventing the rot would be by way of reason, the best course of action. “How?” you might wonder.

The body of the next article explains the answer. 

Cheers and see you soon!!!