Ruthvik Reddy: Vicious trolling by insensitive people can disturb the peace of mind and confidence of actors

 Social media has a lot of positive as well as negative sides, says Ruthvik Reddy. The actor, who will be making his acting debut with National Award winner Arun Shankar’s new single titled Hum, says that while social media is a great way for actors to connect with their fans and vice versa, it also provides a platform for people to troll public figures. “There is no doubt that social media has revolutionized everyone’s lives in this era. Social media has wiped the distance between a star and fan. Fans can have direct access to the star that they like. Not just follow actors, people can have direct interactions with them as well. But social media also gives the power to people, who follow actors, to say negative things about them in public. Vicious trolling by insensitive people has become an extremely common thing today and has the power to disturb the peace of mind and the confidence of actors,” he says.

 He adds, “Everything has its positives and negatives, which cannot be ignored. However, one has to maintain a balance and use it in the right way. It is not fake but a brilliant tool to help you shape your career and profession provided we respect the etiquettes.” However, Ruthvik does add that actors need to be careful while posting stuff as they have the ability to influence many people. “Actors have to be more cautious in their posts as they are always in the limelight. People not only watch but also tend to follow and inculcate the things promoted by actors. This gives a great power in the hands of actors to influence a large number of people. But we need to remember that with great power comes great responsibility. It depends on actors as to how and what kind of information they want to put across to their followers. It could be just a regular style trend of the season or a deeply-impacting social message that they strongly believe in. The moment an actor tries to do things on social media just to please their followers, they have lost the battle,” he says.  The actor says that it is important to not make the number of followers an obsession in your life. “As a human being, everyone wants to be on the top. As people are more curious to know about actors, the number of followers that they have is huge. Competitive feelings often tend to spoil the good intentions behind many things, be it award ceremonies or the number of followers on social media. What is more important is to focus on your work and give the best that you have got. If the actor is focused on improving the quality of his work to perfection, then the number of followers would just be a by-product of that effort,” he says.

 He adds, “The competitiveness in any field makes a person do his best. It is not the ego that makes the actor but thinking of new ways of connecting to their fans through their posts. It depends entirely on us as to how do we utilise its power and how do we want to take it forward in our lives. We also should know where to limit ourselves from the impact of social media and not get carried away with it.”