But it wasn’t as bad as I expected. The first reply I received was from an old school friend, who was super excited to receive a chat from me after so many years. The same thing happened to many of my friends: after having explained what the message was all about, they continued with a “how are you doing?”. I ended up having nice talks with so many friends - all the way back from school, college, and each one now established in different jobs in every corner of the world. The Sunday that I planned to spend all alone, just relaxing at home, turned out to be the most social and active day for me(virtually).

As I scrolled through my Facebook inbox, I found that the message had been sent to lots of other people, whom I met at some point in my life, but over time had lost touch with. Even those who were once good friends, now existed as Facebook friends only, silently liking and rarely commenting on my posts. I never speak to them, nor do I know their whereabouts, unless their latest job or marital status appears in my news feed.

Later at night, I watched a TEDx talk in Maastricht where this lack of social communication syndrome was addressed by the speaker. While he spoke about the lack of willingness of people in the developed world to engage in face to face communication in public areas like trains and buses, I found it equally true for social media communication. We are too busy with our lives to utilize the capacity that modern-day social networking sites have to offer. I have a thousand friends in my Facebook friend list and a single spam message offered me a day full of joyous communication with around ten of them. I would still call it a ‘productive day’!

Now, should I curse or thank the spammers - I can’t decide!