By Rattana Lao

 BANGKOK – It was sometimes ago that the New Yorker featured a cartoon that went something like this: “With the internet, you can be a dog behind a computer and nobody knows.”

[caption id="attachment_60520" align="alignleft" width="200"] Rattana Lao[/caption]

That's my thought on the internet in general and social media in particular. Behind the masks of perfectly manicured life or perfect make up, there are multiple truths, reality, flaws and imperfection.

I joined Facebook when I was doing my Masters  in Development Studies at the London School of Economics– far away from my hometown,  Bangkok, Thailand. Although I had  known about Facebook from my high school roommates when it was only accessible by  Ivy League students, I was not  excited about it. I thought to myself: “who in their right mind publishes their lives to the public?”

At that time, the One Laptop Per Child policy was popular. I remember attending several public forums whereby tech savvy professionals tried to convince low-tech Development experts that the internet is powerful and through it we can end world poverty. Something like that.

Being an outgoing and outspoken introvert, if that makes sense, I signed up for FB with an ambivalent feeling. On the one hand, I wanted to keep in touch with my friends and family from afar – to let them know how I was, what I ate, where I travelled .On the other hand, I was scared and anxious of the unintended consequences. Well, given that my BFF called me “the most intense meaning making machine,” I was not sure I could cope with the outflow of comments from strangers about my life.

As a writer, I travelled a lot and carried multiple devices: cellphone, iPads and computers. I have several notebooks in my bag for different thoughts  and things. I lived in 4 cities in 10 years for school and work: London, New York, Hong Kong and Bangkok, so FB was my tool to store my pictures, poems and proses. I posted some on “public” , mostly I kept them private. In another word, FB was my cloud.
My posts had rarely been LIVE. I posted multiple things: narcissistic  selfies, obnoxious jokes, sentimental poems and love songs. Sometimes I rapped, other times  I put my stream of consciousness out there as if I was meditating. At  times , I created a dialogue as if I was writing an Opera or Broadway show. I was thinking of Pavarotti and Philip Grass.

You see, I am a messed: Fifty Cent x Evita, Phantom x Avenue Q.

Despite my bleached skepticism about privacy I was also very naive about the danger of FB. I believed  at one point, “technology can empower lives, internet can end poverty.” Well, if you read Jeffrey Sachs’ The End of Poverty and Amartya’s Sen Development as Freedom without criticality, that's what you get: go-getter, saving the world an innocent lamb lost in the Wonderland. Or you better try with prof. Anis Bajrektarevic, who –on the topic– offers a first rate (post-industrial) Hegelian thought: Highly mesmerizing, although (for the sake of magic) disguised in the Matrix movie’s Keanu Reeves post-punk character of Neo – modern, fast, lethal, decisive.

My naivety  is best manifested through my five years experience of art project in Thailand. Being a fresh of the boat returnee from overseas education, I thought of putting development theories into practice. I thought  that, given Thailand’s  excessive interest in  “children” and “education”, everybody would be on board with me.

Together with students from around the country, we carried out 15 art projects in various parts of Thailand for different groups and audience. We went to the most remote area of Thailand such as Loei, Lampoon and Lopburi. We brought art supplies and created free space for students to express themselves. Last year, we went to four regions and asked students to paint “Happy Birthday Our Princess” cards to wish our princess a healthy and happy life.

Some of these were funded, mostly were self-funded. All of us in the team called “UNITE Thailand” sacrificed things that we had to create a garage sale so that we are financially independent from donors.

Its what an LSE   degree in Development Studies  had taught me.

[caption id="attachment_60522" align="alignleft" width="300"] Not a laptop in sight[/caption]

Since I have friends from all over the world, I was optimistic that if I posted these beautiful Thai silk from Surin, cotton from Lampoon and leather bags, someone out there would purchase them. Good try. Not quite. One high school friend from Nepal, Salina Giri, bought my mother's Prada bag for $500 US. Although it was the only act of kindness, that meant the world to me and 300 other children in Loei.

The ramification of “sharing my ideas” online was worst. Day after day, I woke up and saw the quotes I put on to promote the projects being hijacked for political, personal and private purposes.

Again, being Buddhist, forgiveness.

I had hated FB for quite sometime because  it interrupted my peace. It allowed strangers to send me hate speech and there was a point, I got several messages that could have put me behind bars . Not  British bars. Jail.. Some people mistook my Coco necklace for  Communism and they read  my initial R as Radical.

Perhaps my political sarcasm had gone too far, perhaps my English vocabulary has confused many. I have repeatedly  gone through the missteps  in my head and finally I had the epiphany. It was me who was stupid.

No one in their right mind would type Chekov “The Story of Nobody” right after “Anna K” – Nobody – would put “Evita” right next to “Alicia.”

Well, I did.
All the degrees I hold did not prevent me from self-destruction and public humiliation,

I would like to dedicate this piece to all the children out there who think they can SHARE their works, who believe that FB LIKES are REAL and who wait for an  INBOX from somebody to take them to the Empire State. “DO NOT BE LIKE ME,”
No one knows that behind the happy hello kitty profile picture of a go-getter oversized cheerleader, I had just survived the worst Asthma attack and breathing in tears, in the depth of the Thai forest.

If Development is Freedom and if Sen was right, allow me to free myself from the chained cruelty of Facebook. I didn't deactivate it, I threw my phone in the river and said a  final goodbye.

ttana Lao – is a lecturer at Thai Studies, atPridi Banomyong International College, Thammasat University. She is also the author of “A critical Studies of Thailand Higher Education Reform: The Culture of Borrowing,” which was published with Routledge in 2015. Contact her under:  amp.lao(at)gmail.com , read her: www.amplao.com