Social media is redefining our daily consciousness-its relevance the excess and the banality
‘Small is beautiful’, wrote EF Schumacher. In his classic arguing for a meaningful ‘way of life’ he said that the gigantic can be ugly and overwhelming, a monster, driven by profit, unsustainable, anti-ecology, unable to accept parallel opinions or dissent. The big is often a bully
In another classic, ‘Deschooling Society’, by German philosopher Ivan Illich, the principle argument is that both learning and unlearning must go together. That it is more important to ‘unlearn’ and get rid of the inherited baggage of prejudices, clichés, warped up notions of patriarchy and power, and a vast empire of ignorance perceived as literacy/education. In Paulo Freire’s ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’, another milestone in alternative thinking, he argues that young minds are not empty receptacles that they can be bombed with detached information. They are not passive, like television viewers perched on a sofa. They are dynamic, inquisitive, restless, tortured and sublime minds, forever trying to break barriers. The media is not god.
That is, the mainstream media becomes so predictable, so oppressive and so boring, especially the audio-visual media. It censors information and knowledge systems automatically, photoshops the complex kaleidoscope of colours and black white realism, skips routinely the depths of knowledge, avoids conflict zones as much as moments of liberation or discovery, and toes the establishment line almost always. Besides, it is solely driven by profit, ad revenue and TRP ratings. It celebrates the tyranny of mediocrity and drags everyone down to its own level.
Not anymore. The bubble of the social media is bursting like an ocean in a cage, both liberating and oppressive, across the vertical and horizontal of the information system, dismantling the fixed and fixated edifice of mediocrity and the power of manipulation. Katharine Viner, editor of The Guardian, argued in 2013 in a lecture that it is like going back to the pre-media pre-printing age. In the beginning was the word. In the beginning was also dream, fantasy, memory. Almost like entering a pre-information system, primordial, intangible, fleeting and threadless,breaking all boundaries of control.
The social media has challenged the fixity of the media industry, its columns headlines, architecture, design alignments, sound, visual, structure and sensibility.
The web has changed the way we organise information in a very clear way: from the boundaried, solid format of books and newspapers to something liquid and freeflowing, with limitless possibilities… A newspaper is complete. It is finished, sure of itself, certain. By contrast, digital news is constantly updated, improved upon, changed, moved, developed, an ongoing conversation and collaboration. It is living, evolving, limitless, relentless,” said Viner.
It is like a chaupal under a peepal tree in a village, a centre of story-telling. Or, like great Hindi writer Muktibodh’s ‘brahmarakshas’ perched on top of a tree outside the village, or, even the blackboard in the village where Gandhi’s followers would write the latest news of the freedom movement. So, how come the Dandi March became a ‘national event’ in an era where there was no information system, and in a backward and vast country like India? Or, how come, the whole country cried when Bhagat Singh was hanged at the drop of dawn?
Multi-media information in the social media moves in spirals, like oral and folk traditions. It defies logic, proximity and topicality. It is beyond race, colour and lines of control. It is also entering new zones of the social and private, something unprecedented in history.
Private spaces are becoming public: mothers when they were young, exotic food cooked for all to see – no sharing please --, travel and fun, intimate moments, unrequited love, smell, texture, fabric, song, desire, memory, mixing like never before, for all to see. A daily spectacle, like a village festival. A mela.
It is also narcissistic, a celebration of megalomania, the cannibalism of selfies, a caricature of excess and banality; but that is the nature of the creature. You can’t have it picture perfect
And, yet, the big business big bully media thought police can’t censor information or feelings anymore. Here, you can one enter one hundred years of solitude and magic realism. Dalits are reporting from the bylanes when the TV channels are obsessed with their daily shouting match, prime time. Students are capturing police and ABVP atrocities, proving that they were no ‘clashes’. No one goes to the cops to find out the crowd size – there are videos to prove that. News is becoming pre-news, pre-dated, pre-prime time. All the juice, all the news
Argues Viner: We are no longer the allseeing all-knowing journalists, delivering words from on high for readers to take in, passively, save perhaps an occasional letter to the editor. Digital has wrecked those hierarchies almost overnight, creating a more levelled world, where responses can be instant, where some readers will almost certainly know more about a particular subject than the journalist, where the reader might be better placed to uncover a story…”