The jury is still out on whether Lalit Modi lined the pockets of his Armani suits during his IPL reign, but there’s no question he’s an innovator and an original thinker. At the height of the BCCI’s campaign against him, Mr Modi got himself interviewed by a PIO journalist in London and uploaded it on YouTube. It was a smart move made more dramatic by the medium. Anyone with a PC, laptop or smartphone, could watch it, and not have to wait for the TV channels with their beady eye on TRP’s.
Increasingly (with apologies to the late lamented Mr McCluhan), it’s a medium that’s becoming the new message. We have all been scandalised, whether vicariously or on a professional level, by the infamous Niira Radia tapes. No one quite knows who leaked them or why, but the impact was devastating. Reading it in print was nowhere near the same as hearing the voices on the tapes. Big Brother may have been listening but so were thousands of netizens as they accessed them on the web.
The WikiLeaks’ diplomatic disclosures were again released on the Net and acquired the same way. We are caught in the path of a digital tsunami as new media starts to overtake the old. Twitter, Facebook, Orkut and all the other social media sites that are being embraced so ardently by Indians have begun to challenge the way we access and disseminate information, even setting the agenda for debate and discussion.
2010 has been a defining year for new media and its impact, best exemplified by Shashi Tharoor and his twitter accounts. What made over five lakh people want to access the tweets of a junior minister of state in the United Progressive Alliance government? Irreverence perhaps, unusual in a politician, but the fact that one twitter too many eventually cost him his job proved the awesome power of the medium. Writers can re-read, alter and proofread their copy well before it appears. The digital space, as Mr Tharoor discovered while travelling cattle class, does not allow for such indulgences. 2010 also saw how new media was challenging and changing traditional media and its practitioners. Journalists who wrote one article a day if they were in the mood are now also writing blogs, tweeting, Facebooking and providing constant news bytes in an effort to keep up with the challengers, namely the new media populated by non-professionals but equally effective and engaging, albeit in an amateurish, uncoordinated way.
The laptop and smartphone have become our universe and we are all now netizens, digital soldiers defending a brave new world. Life, in a few years, could be radically different from what it is today. Already, families converse more via email and SMS than they do in person. Tweets and blogs are now the official lingua franca of conversation and debate. The number of Facebook users in India has risen from 0.7 million in 2008 to 3 million in 2009 and 13 million today. For society in general, is it a net loss or a net gain? As in Mr Modi’s case, the jury is still out on whether the electronic-digital invasion of our senses and opinions is a positive development or a negative one. The positives are obvious. More voices encourage a wider debate. In other words, the liberal space is expanding and that can only be a good thing. The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. The new tools of social media have reinvented social activism. With Facebook and Twitter and the like, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, co-ordinate and give voice to their concerns. In societies where the media is controlled, new media is filling the gap. Witness the blogs and podcasts that flooded the net and showed the world the angry protests in Iran recently over the rigged election and the crackdown that followed. The fact that politicians like L.K. Advani, now in his 80s, can open a Facebook account to appeal to younger voters is proof enough of the power of new media. Earlier this year, actor Gul Panag tweeted about the poor quality of food she was served on a Jet Airways flight. The airline promptly changed their caterer. Whether celebrities, Bollywood stars, sportspersons or corporate hi-fliers, everyone’s using Twitter or blogs to massage their egos, get back at rivals or push a project.
The biggest revelation of 2010, however, was that the news agenda, as the Radia tapes exemplified, is no longer driven from the top. Increasingly, “citizen journalists” are exposing wrong doing and uploading visuals captured on cellphones as evidence. Every media house in the country is chanting the mantra of “convergence”, narrowing the gap between the print and the digital space. Traditional media can’t keep pace with the new world of media consumption and the insatiable appetite for information, especially when it has yet to understand the true promise and opportunity that social media represents. This battle is not about adapting an existing model to new, popular broadcast channels. It’s about expanding and forcing a fundamental renaissance within the news machine itself — transforming and creating how media houses can monetise new streams and platforms. New media or social media is serving as the catalyst for the evolution of news judgment and connecting directly with citizens. The methodology associated with embracing social media in general is in direct response to its insurgence and the competitive threat it represents. Old media is reacting simply because of the authority associated with emerging social networks. Where activists were once defined by their causes, they are now defined by their tools. Facebook warriors may be keeping up with friends, but they are also spearheading social change.
New Media represents the death of distance. Just last week, campus placements across the Indian Institutes of Technology went hi-tech for the first time, with interviews being conducted on Facebook and Skype, the Internet voice protocol service, between students and potential employers in the US. Here’s the breaking news: the biggest paychecks were being offered by Facebook, followed by Google. Then there’s the flipside. In Andrew Keen’s highly debated book, The Cult of the Amateur, he writes: “There’s a tipping point right now with new, traditional, and social media. It’s conversation versus fact checking. No one has answers to where this convergence is leading”. It’s not easy to be profound in 140 characters and the Internet now provides the ability to overwhelm ourselves with content. Static web pages are so yesterday, now RSS feeds, email notifications and tweets are competing for our attention throughout our day. What was once fun and useful can also become irritating electronic noise. 2010 may have been the Year of the Tweet but we’re still not sure where all this is headed. There is a truism, proven over centuries, about revolutions. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.
Dilip Bobb is a Delhi-based senior journalist. Satire is his forte.
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