Poke on facebook

My father had this look of disbelief. “Poke?…really?” Having spent his formative years in the pre-social media days, he just couldn’t understand why ‘poking’ a friend was ‘cool’.To people of his generation, poking was (and is) a sign of bad behaviour. Simply, not the thing you can do regularly to a friend.

Which set us thinking. Has social media merely changed how we connect with people and how we share information? Or has it added more words to our vocabulary, and at a deeper level, altered meanings for us?

Let’s take the example of ‘poke’. The word changes from being ‘not-so-positive’ to acceptable and even popular in the context of Facebook. From what we gather, poking was the ‘in-thing’ in the early days of this medium. Now the latest is to fertilize crops on virtual farms. The other day, over dinner, a friend laughed about how he spends late nights trying to sow seeds (of course, on his farm)! The Victorian-era writers would be turning in their graves!

Call it a sign of wide-spread popularity. The urban populace has taken to social media tremendously and the proof is in their conversations. Recently, a few of us were having a lively debate about weddings, exchanging views and ideas. A friend suddenly exclaimed, “what a lovely idea; I must ‘blog’ about it.” Similarly, ‘tweeting’ and ‘Facebooking’ have also become much-used verbs.

Just that the dictionaries are yet to list them. ‘Tweet’ still goes by the conventional definition of a ‘weak chirping made by a bird’. Surprising, how in our usage, tweeting is a clear way of articulating. There’s no sign of weakness, not even the slightest. And though  ‘facebooking’ is not recognised, ‘facebook’ itself does throw up definitions.

Perhaps it’s time to update the dictionaries. For, as more people join the social media pages, and more channels give us more options to connect, vocabularies will reflect the changes.