Political Changes Through Social Media
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Facebook has 1.4 billion users spend 20
billion minutes per day on it.
Twitter has 240 million users who send an
average of 145 million tweets per day.
YouTube users upload around 4.5 million
hours of video per month and in the same interval, 6 billion hours of video
get viewed.
WhatsApp boasts of 465 million active users
in less than 4 years.
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In the history of mankind, it has never been
easier for people to communicate with each other, at such a low cost.
Information
which was available to a select minority is now available to the masses for
free and through multiple channels. Not
only is it easy to publish our smallest thoughts, but with technology it has
also become trouble-free to find a niche audience, however geographically
dislocated. And remember, social media is not just a tool for spreading
knowledge; it also helps us share basic human emotions such as joy, sadness,
love, excitement, admiration, outrage and disgust.
The Internet
is slowly being transformed from just a huge repository of information to a
mass collective of human consciousness. Aristotle
said that a human is ‘by nature a social animal’ and looks for companionship
and peer reconfirmation as part of self-fulfillment. This evolutionary
psychology is the central theme of the spread of social media. We can share the
good feelings and we can vent our frustrations. And these frustrations go viral especially
against the current social and political order.
We have
seen the manifestation of this particularly in world politics. The first of
these were noticed in December 2010 in the restrictive societies of the Middle-East
and is now famously known as Arab Spring. But similar expressions have spread
throughout the world where there are inequalities, and despotic or corrupt governments
like in Indonesia, Thailand, Spain, Portugal, Venezuela, Brazil and Ukraine.
And this is not limited to only the developing countries - even the developed
and ‘free’ society of the USA had to encounter the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Most of
these protests have some commonalities: they
start as largely non-violent civil resistance campaigns involving
rallies, marches, sit-ins (dharna) and strikes; they make effective use of
social media to raise awareness, communicate and loosely organize themselves;
they have mostly been spearheaded by middle-class youth; they have similarities
to the Eastern European revolution during the fall of the USSR… or the French
Revolution… where the common man was able to overthrow an established regime; and at no juncture in
history, has it been easier to gather such a vast number of people, especially
in urban areas. We can find similar patterns in India: nation-wide disgust against
corruption and scams led to the Anna movement, and a sympathy wave over a
brutal rape led to the Nirbhaya crusade. Both contributed to the rise of the
AAP in India.
However,
another pattern slowly emerges. Even though these movements have been
successful in changing the existing political hierarchy, they have often led to
anarchy because the loosely organized multitude could not provide a central
leader. We saw it in Egypt where the movement eventually led to a Muslim
Brotherhood and finally an army rule. We saw similarities in other movements
where, after the initial euphoria, it fizzled out due to infighting and diluted
motivations, only to be replaced by another authoritarian version of it.
The
leadership talent, much needed to raise awareness and protest, often does not
translate into a visionary government. This leads to a worse uncertainty instead
of better and transparent governance. In India we are yet to figure out how the
AAP party will metamorphose over time and how the other main stream parties
will manage to incorporate the learning.
Snowden’s revelations
clearly show that there is a concerted effort by governments around the world
to monitor, clamp down & control social media. In India, we have seen cases of violence and
hasty police action. This has eroded the confidence of the masses – people now
think twice before posting opinions in public forums especially in countries
with ambiguous interpretation of free speech.
Another
pitfall is that social media can also be used to spread misinformation easily. Governments, political parties and vested
interest groups can easily spread lies and fear through this channel since there is no verification by an
independent source. People need to be critical
and circumspect; they need to do their own in-depth research which, more often
than not, never happens.
We know
that social media’s reach is vast, but there are two areas where bias creeps
in. Firstly, a person’s friends are
limited and their similar predispositions can easily reaffirm a wrong idea in
the person’s mind. Secondly, even with its mass adaptability, social media is
still largely confined to a small percentage of the ‘urban educated’ in a
country like India. Hence the so called
representative view of social media is not universal at all, and decisions
based solely on it may be entirely off-track.
Social
media should be referred to as an additional source of information and the user
needs to use critical judgment and be unbiased when using it. But one thing is certain - social media has given a voice to the masses and the
government can no longer take them for granted. The movement has a transforming
effect on some, and a new breed of leaders is sure to emerge in next couple of decades.
(This article was first published in the Spring edition of New Acropolis, Bangalore)
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