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By Siyabonga Dube
Nothing depresses more than waking up and checking your timeline on either facebook, twitter or any other social networking site of your choice to find more than three posts ranting about the same thing “Haters”
Well one question, what is a hater? What characteristics actually define a hater, want to find out the most simple and direct answer, ask the great prophet “google”. The prophet defines this as a person who greatly dislikes a specified person or thing. Now according to some others it’s a person who is jealous of someone’s possessions or lifestyle. So the question now is, do I hate you or am I jealous of you, in a simpler form do I envy who you are or do I straight up don’t like you. This introducing what can be called dislike, than just being upfront and referral to how people feel about you as hate.
Hate, Dislike and Jealousy are three different things. They might fall under the same category of “Negative Feelings” but still are totally different things. Now does one actually know which is directly affecting them before they go up to social networks and start going on and on about people who are suspected to be his or her haters.
According to Malik Yusef the Grammy winning songwriter and spoken word artist “Haters don’t start of as haters”. Its true no one wakes up one morning and hates someone or a certain trend, most of these things are triggered by actions which one does which could either be offensive or just straight up derogatory. Now since a very large scale of South Africans (and the world abroad) have switched off their “Meet & Greet” skills and use more of social networking platforms to say nearly everything and anything at any time. It is here we see the birth of people who actually assume they have people who are against them
A flaw of social networks which is rarely picked up is how they are created to make you feel good about yourself and others, without actually meeting them in person and making a clean uncut judgment. According to an article by Leela Bullen “You start comparing their perceived happiness to yours , the gifts they got and the ones you wanted that are still at the store, and finally how much better their life is and yours sucks”.
So can one define a person who is finding their life a little less attractive compared to yours a hater? which can’t be factually proven as this is a state of mind that person is suffering from, for instance doesn’t like your status updates, ignores your tweets, doesn’t like your pictures or simply unfriends you. That in no way is “hate”. If the person starts making comments about you without your consent he or she doesn’t hate you.
Now the twist is a strategy that is used by people commonly on social networks on how just because a certain number of people out all the friends didn’t like this or retweet that, they now hate you. This draws much attention and modifies this profile of a mere random Joe to a high class profile personnel.
In order to hate someone or someone to hate, that person should pose a threat to you and the only way one can pose a threat, is if he or she is in anyway a hazardous harm issue to you.
Now the question is do you really have haters? Or have people who are envious of your lifestyle and is that lifestyle really depicting who you really are. From a study from the Pew Research Internet Project it highlights how internet users trust most people. This opens the placement for factors like gullibility and mind manipulation. As the deception of what people say and do on social networks is actually very high compared to their real lives.
So before you go on a tweeting or posting escapade saying you have haters consider if you really do have them, they have a good solid reasons to hate you and you are in some way a threat to them.
If not then take a seat.
