The vices of social media

Shreya was livid with anger. This was the nth time her mom had chided her.

“What do you keep texting” every few seconds. Her mom chided

“..and you don’t seem to have any control on your social media and internet usage”

“Last evening, our neighbor saw you browsing in a dingy internet cafe with a boy”

“Who is that Boy. May I know ” asked her mom.

“Amma he is just a friend from college.

And amma every one has a facebook account these days. Parents are creating one even for new borns

Why do you have an issue in whatever I do amma ” replied back Shreya, sharply.

Amma thew her hands up in the air. “You will pay heavily one day Shreya. Mark my words”, amma replied

Shreya was a spirited 16 year old, in a posh urban college in upscale Koramangala in Bengaluru. At 16, the teenager, had opened an Facebook account and added a 100 odd friends on her online account, 99 + 1 to be exact. After all Rakesh was extra special for her.

Her fingers so badly wanted to press the “Committed – in a relationship” button against her facebook account, after all she saw many of her older cousins do it.

But she knew her mom and dad would be livid with anger.

Aman’s fingers scrolled mechanically through the endless feed. Each image a carefully curated lie. His “perfect” vacation photo had been taken during a thunderstorm, waiting for a single moment of sunshine. His “intimate family dinner” was staged after the meal, everyone summoned back to their seats for the shot.

He watched as his childhood friend Priya garnered thousands of likes for a transformation photo. What the numbers didn’t show: the eating disorder that had preceded it, the dermatologist’s warnings she’d ignored, the anxiety that spiked whenever a post failed to reach expected engagement.

The algorithm rewarded extremity – the most shocking, the most curated, the most fake. Truth was invisible. Nuance died in truncated captions. Kindness went unrewarded. Only outrage, only spectacle, only the performance of a self that bore no resemblance to the human behind the screen.

Aman realized he no longer knew who he was without an audience. His thoughts existed only to be posted. His experiences happened only if they could be photographed. His relationships were transactional – leverage for engagement, content for the algorithm’s appetite.

He thought of the old folk tales his grandmother had told him – stories that had survived centuries not because they were shocking, but because they were true. They didn’t require validation from strangers. They didn’t promise happiness for conformity. They simply reflected the human condition.

Aman closed the app. The silence that followed felt strange. But slowly, it began to feel like freedom.

Later that evening, Shreya sat alone in her room, her phone glowing in the darkness. Her Instagram feed showed twelve photos from the morning – all carefully curated versions of a single moment. The reality: she’d woken late, skipped breakfast, and felt anxious about an exam. But the feed showed filtered sunlight, a perfect smoothie bowl (borrowed from her roommate), and a caption: “Living my best life!” One hundred and forty-three likes already.

She scrolled through her friends’ feeds. Pooja was in Paris (for one day, tagged at the airport). Arjun was “crushing it at the gym” (a bicep selfie, his third this week). Divya’s engagement announcement read like a Bollywood screenplay, complete with rose petals and violins. Yet Shreya knew the behind-the-scenes truth: Pooja had maxed her credit card, Arjun was battling an injury he wouldn’t discuss, and Divya had cried for an hour about wedding debt.

The next morning, her mother found her scrolling aimlessly. “Amma, everyone’s parents accept that social media is just how we communicate now,” Shreya began, but her voice faltered. She’d seen the neighborhood boy at that dingy internet cafe, yes – but he wasn’t a romantic interest. He was a classmate working through a crisis she’d promised to keep private. Yet to the boy she’d spoken with online, she’d implied something altogether different.

Her mother sat beside her, not angry now, just tired. “Beta, I don’t understand the world you’re living in. But I see this: you’re performing for an audience of strangers while ignoring the people in your home. The attention is addictive. The validation is empty. And worst of all – you’re becoming someone different in each place: the happy daughter here, the rebellious girl there, the sophisticated traveler somewhere else.”

Shreya wanted to defend herself, but couldn’t. Her mother’s words mirrored something she’d felt for months: the constant shape-shifting was exhausting. She was fragments of a person, scattered across platforms, performing for algorithms designed to keep her scrolling. The real Shreya – uncertain, flawed, ordinary – had become the least popular version of herself.

Moral

Social media distorts truth and feeds envy, turning friends into rivals and honest words into weapons of shame. Virtue thrives only in spaces where people trust each other’s names.

Historical & Cultural Context

Aesop’s Fables are short animal tales traditionally attributed to the enslaved Greek storyteller Aesop (c. 620–564 BCE). Each fable compresses a moral into a vivid scene, and through Latin, Arabic and European retellings they became a backbone of moral education worldwide.

This modern retelling applies the Panchatantra’s ancient wisdom to contemporary life, reflecting how digital platforms echo the “Jackal and Crow” and similar tales of miscommunication. Like classical fables, it shows how information – true or false – shapes relationships when users cannot verify sources or intent, teaching digital literacy through timeless narrative.

Reflection & Discussion

1. How is social media like the jackal spreading gossip in old fables? What changes when we can’t see someone’s face?
2. When someone posts about you online, what makes you believe it? How can we know what’s real?
3. If Shreya had talked to her friend directly instead of reading posts, what would have changed? Why does this still matter today?

Did You Know?

• Aesop was believed to be a slave in ancient Greece around 620–564 BCE.
• Aesop’s Fables have been retold for over 2,500 years across virtually every culture.
• Many common English phrases like “sour grapes” and “crying wolf” come from Aesop’s Fables.

What This Tale Teaches Us Today

Old stories keep their power because their lessons never stop being useful. Here is how this one still applies:

• Shared stories are one of the strongest bonds within any community – families, cultures, or whole nations.
• Reading folk tales aloud to children builds vocabulary, imagination, and a sense of cultural inheritance.
• Stories that have survived for centuries have done so because their lessons still work.

Why This Story Still Matters

The vices of social media joins a vast global library of folk tales that human beings have been telling one another for thousands of years. Every culture has produced its own stories, but the deepest themes – courage, kindness, cleverness, loyalty, the cost of greed – appear again and again in different clothes. Modern readers who spend time with folk tales inherit something precious: a sense that people have always wrestled with the same basic questions, and that good stories can still help us find good answers. That is why these tales persist. Each one is a small tool for living, handed down quietly through generations.

Cultural Context and Continuing Influence

Folk tales like this one survived for hundreds of years through oral storytelling before any scholar thought to write them down. Grandparents told them to grandchildren, travelers traded them along roads and rivers, and mothers repeated them to babies who would one day repeat them to their own children. Each small retelling sharpened the story, discarded unnecessary parts, and polished the essential lesson. That long process of refinement is why a good folk tale feels so weighty – it has been shaped by thousands of listeners across generations, each contributing something small to the story we read today.

Modern readers sometimes wonder whether folk tales are still relevant in an age of apps and smartphones. The answer is yes, perhaps more than ever. The technology changes, but the underlying questions – about kindness, courage, loyalty, greed, family, fear, love – do not. These are the same questions that children asked around a fire in ancient India, around a hearth in medieval Ireland, around a campfire in 19th-century Korea. And they are the same questions children ask their parents today, just phrased differently. That is why a family that reads folk tales together is doing real cultural and emotional work, not simply entertaining itself.

Reading Folk Tales With Children

Reading folk tales aloud to children is one of the oldest and most effective forms of moral education. Unlike a lecture or a rule, a story slides past a child’s natural resistance and plants its lesson in the imagination, where it quietly grows. Years later, when the child meets a real situation that resembles the story – a bully at school, a dishonest coworker, a moment of temptation – the old tale rises to the surface of memory and offers guidance. That is why parents and teachers across every culture have trusted stories to do the work of raising good humans, long before formal schools or textbooks existed.

When reading this story with a young listener, try pausing at key moments and asking what the child thinks will happen next. Let them guess, even if they are wrong. That small act of prediction turns a passive listener into an active thinker. After the story ends, a simple open question – “What would you have done?” or “Who do you think was the smartest character?” – invites the child to connect the tale to their own life. Those conversations are where real learning happens, not during the reading itself but in the quiet moments that follow.

Older children and teenagers sometimes think they have outgrown folk tales. In reality, the best tales only deepen with age. A ten-year-old hears the surface plot; a fifteen-year-old notices the irony; a twenty-year-old sees the economic and political pressures on the characters; a forty-year-old understands the parents in the story for the first time. A good folk tale is a gift that keeps unfolding for decades. Families who read and reread the same stories across the years discover this naturally, and pass the discovery down.