By Ananya Dutta Gupta
A major impact digital media has had on the general user across age-groups is the felt urgency, if not compulsion to react to news. The more traumatic the event and the more intensive its coverage the greater the sense of urgency. The operative word here is “reaction”, as opposed to “response”; and one-touch access to social media apps implies the pressure to react instantly, lest the delay be interpreted as selfish apathy, if not silent complicity.
There is a lot that is right with such social connectedness and interventionism, if conducted responsibly. We are already seeing the extent to which individuals may feel empowered to come forward and talk about their traumatic experiences.
However, I am exercised by the sensationalist outbursts from a wider perimeter of users, those who are not immediate stakeholders except in the generalised sense of being members of what social networks tend to call the “community”. The enduring risk lies in expending all our activist energy in ephemeral commentary, with little left over for times when the dust has settled. Public memory is short. Digital public memory is even shorter. The chaos and cacophony thus unleashed necessarily gives way to fatigue and disengagement, and a natural urge to seek relief in more salubrious prompts. No wonder then that social-media-driven event-mindedness fails to make any essential, qualitative distinction between one event and another. Today we mourn, tomorrow we conveniently switch to celebration mode.
Digital vigilantism can become a dangerously convenient shorthand for all kinds of quick-fix communitarianism. We are almost instantaneously sucked into a violent and vicious salvo of partisan allegations and counteraccusations, indeed into a veritable armchair mob, baying for symbolic blood. Somewhere in the name of triggering a healthy public debate, we end up gloating over the misfortune on display. The initial shock and outrage quickly give over to our common human tendency to escape into the project of meaning-making and causal speculation. For even as we live, die, hurt, spite, kill without meaning, our minds cannot bear to live, die, hurt, spite, kill without attributing meaning to our own actions and those of others. Meaning here is always moral meaning and conditioned by the need to absolve by indicting. The escape thus sought is from the horror of acknowledging the fundamental nature of human savagery, of recognizing the absence of any obvious contradiction between scintillating intellect and moral depravity. There was some outcry some months back about bullying in the workplace. The outcry subsided after the prompt dismissal of the accused. The reason for this could well be the systemic nature of such strategic harangues in the interest of meeting business targets in the corporate sector. While that was bullying with a purpose, however inadmissible that might sound, bullying in educational institutions is an even more perverse mimicking of war at its most unequal and unregulated. It makes a sport out of one human being’s fear and humiliation for the pleasure and amusement of another or often many others. One would have expected that access to information about the bitter war in Ukraine and the intense violence in Manipur to have chastened, of all people, university students who generally evince a greater awareness of issues. Clearly, not all of them. Generally, we do not see everyday violence as violence and violation.
What appears to have shocked society most about the devastatingly gruesome death of Swapnadeep Kundu is the stark anomaly between the perpetrators’ scholastic merit and their perverseness of conduct. Again, we are conditioned to attach delinquency to privation, rather than to the privilege of education; and we are conditioned in turn to connect education to edification. Since art often helps us see what we fail to remember of life, let us in the context of the horrific incident in question remind ourselves of Alfred Hitchcock’s film, Rope (1948). The shock is the other side of our denial of the obvious. Have we not also watched Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971)?
It is true that boys and men are hard-wired to consider bullying and endurance to bullying as a kind of litmus test of manhood. Hence this mimicking of the milieu of war in times of increased civilianisation. Yet my experience at the euphemistically named “intro”, on the first day of Higher Secondary studies at a reputed all-girls’ college all those years back left me traumatised enough not to want to go back the following day. I owe it to my mother that I returned and went on to spend two intellectually and culturally stimulating years there.
There could be two different ways of addressing the matter long-term – externally, through the imposition of discipline, and internally, through individual and collective awareness-building. The former, when taken to an extreme, leads to a surveillance society that stunts the latter, while the extreme form of the latter leads to anarchy demanding a return to the former. The middle ground may be ideal, where external enforcement and internal vigil – something like an in-built internal 24×7 CCTV camera – work relentlessly and in tandem. The latter is difficult to sustain. Besides, even if we were to watch ourselves every moment, it might well beget a resentment against external regulation and intervention, in direct proportion to the perceived sense of our own growing awareness and conscientiousness. Both conscience and consciousness have clay feet, and perfect harmony between external surveillance and self-rule is almost unachievable for long. There is further the unique historicity of each institution in society and the consequent pre-conditioning of ways in which it negotiates the above friction, between the rule of law and the rule of free will.
Thus, the complexity of the issue stems from the concatenation of several contingent factors acting upon certain primal human instincts. It is vital to re-adjust education at all levels to accommodate some form of fundamental moral teaching about the necessity and benefits of showing consideration to other members of society. Yet in a society such as ours, moral education remains deeply entangled with faith and belief systems. Hence the need to pause and ponder.
Instead, thanks to the split-second swiftness of news circulation, every time we are faced with a heinous act by ordinary people among us, we get busy classifying it in adherence to our respective received prejudices about class, gender, and locus of origin. Institutional demography and geographical location are quickly subjected to glib polarisation, in alignment with the broad, ill-defined, fluid categories of privilege and privation, even where such criteria do not automatically apply. This classificatory zeal also comes from the urgency to identify a scapegoat – individual, group, institution – whichever applies. This urgency is quickly made the premise for declamatory proclamations, vilification and public shaming, in what might seem like an abstracted form of a mob beating up a suspected thief I once witnessed in a smalltown neighbourhood. Deep inside, our faith in bashing up has far from died out.
Scapegoating affords more psychological gratification than we commonly acknowledge. It soothes our frayed and frazzled faith in our own untarnished reasonableness, the estimate of which feeds off the perception of other human being’s lack. Our quickness to react then comes less from our sense of shared empathy and shock than from an unacknowledged sense of self-vindication and self-validation at the humiliation of those whom we grudgingly admire for their success. For we are into that stage of globalisation, when the tint of novelty has faded, and the monster of all-round resentment has reared its ugly head. In this undifferentiated vortex of deflected mutual animosity, we are hard-wired to think that the success of a person or an institution must invariably be at the expense of another’s.
While this was certainly true in the context of feudalism and colonialism, and is also often true now as vestiges of both forces lurk underneath the veneer of free society, hyper-sensitivity to injustice on social platforms breeds another equally dangerous kind of toxicity – mass intolerance and the culture of rage. Bombarded with visuals and snippets of first information, our ability to distinguish between contributing factors that are consequential and those that are at least relatively incidental or extraneous takes a dip. We rush to paint everything incumbent in black and everything that it may have replaced in blanket white. Such reactivism poses a potent hindrance to genuine positive all-round social change.
All this erupts through the active effort of an intrusive electronic media, for whom no grief has sanctity, no home is private enough. Here too, the contributing issue is one of excess. One glimpse at the number of cameras and microphones hounding the parents of one of the accused is enough. What exactly can a parent have to say under such circumstances? The plethora of mushrooming news channels, simultaneously telecasting through television sets and global streaming platforms like YouTube no doubt demands that their high-pitched reporters meet the TRP targets thrust upon them. Their livelihoods no doubt hinge on weaponising their camera and their voice, on grabbing the first or the most “exclusive” story, which is then streamed into countless homes accompanied by dramatic soundtrack. Theirs too is a kind of frenetic reportage in the name of investigative journalism. The very reason for the proliferation of channels is competition and divergence of ideologies, so that there is no imagination of sharing data collected by one umbrella news agency. Ordinary consumers of news are literally spoilt by choice, and not just spoilt for choice. What this goes to prove is another fundamental human truth, our love of stories. In the name of truth, we actually crave for “stories”, the truer, the better. In this late era of the “culture industry”, we have been co-opted into a system that thrives not only on the homogenised packaging of all stories – food court style – but also on the conviction that quotidian reality affords the ultimate story material.
The paradox inherent in our reactiveness is noteworthy. The exponentially reduced time-lag between dispatch and delivery, the knowledge that we can convey our message whenever we are ready, does not have the desired effect of making us pause and ponder, desirous of absorbing more facts as and when discovered and divulged. Instead, it doubles the itch to communicate whatever we think or feel at that instant, in the secure knowledge that we can retract, revise, and contradict ourselves with equal rapidity again and again at a later instant. Such a dynamic of communication is at odds with, rather than an aid to considered, observant opinion-building.
The primary reason for this cynical reliance on crowdsourcing of information and citizen vigilantism is of course the partly justified and partly presumed erosion of faith in the neutrality and accountability of fact-finding agencies. As a society, we are almost resigned to the fact that facts will be suppressed. In this climate of distrust, understandably, speculation thrives. No doubt social media platforms empower the ordinary citizen to regulate and report non-action; but one wonders if the attention paid to reportage too is not driven by bulk rather than judiciousness. If agencies of administration in the pre-digital era were entirely deaf to petitions and complaints, now these too shuffle their priorities in sync with decibel count and the quantum of immediate protest. In this era of camera-driven accountability, these too now pay a greater premium to being seen as proactive before receding, once the camera has moved over, into the vortex of inaction and apathy.
It is understandable and necessary that ordinary citizens should want to have a voice and an access to the ear of the administration. The question that it begs is whether hastily assembled corrective measures sustain the motivation to keep that machinery well-oiled and vigilant. In an algorithm-driven feedback mechanism, the lone, patient whistleblower stands no chance. The vigilance and voice should operate all the year round, not allow itself to be swept up by the juggernaut of media mayhem. Let us lend our eyes and ears to those on the ground, hold our judgement in reserve.
Instead, many of us are fettered and pawned to the invisible strings of short-lived visibility-driven populism. In medieval England, plays were staged at market corners. Today, a large part of the performativity of protest on site is geared towards the virtual market of viewership, where the inbuilt capturing and circulating device called the smartphone and the hoped-for virulence of circulation. No wonder that those trying to protect themselves from public shaming take recourse to comparable performative skills, e.g., crying in public.
Frequent television commentators who often lend their voice are on such occasions baited and goaded for allegedly partisan silence. While this may or may not be true, the consequence of such misdirected vigilantism is unlikely to foster anything other than mutual resentment between the social commentator, thus hounded, and the very consumers who surveil and judge them implicitly in lieu of “likes”. The nomenclature of “following”, needless to say, is a double-edged sword. This is mutual parasitism, as opposed to the genuine cooperation that should be the backbone of civil society.
It as if a statement from such personalities would solve the crisis overnight, as though their words would fall like manna and dew on the ears of those morally disaffected or depraved enough to have acted in flagrant violation of all norms of humanity. However, as we may have noted in some of the accused, far from showing any compunction, they are busy applying the resources of their minds to exonerating themselves. Unfortunately, it is easier to live with guilt than with shame. Guilt hits much later than shame.
In our mutually whipped up anxiety to sound socially aware and public-spirited in our little spheres of “public reason”, we unknowingly end up obfuscating the difference between censoriousness and constructive action on the ground. Potentially, the outcome of this collective hysteria is the displacement of focus from the momentousness of the event and the plight of the actual sufferer(s) towards those who even with the best of intentions come up with the headiest, rather than the most level-headed assessment.
The flipside of relentless poaching of spaces and moments in the name of visual documentation also means that we react only to the most extreme incidents and horrors. Our voracity for the horrors of human savagery rises, in inverse proportion to our sensitivity to the sufferings of our fellow human. The more we watch, the less we see, and the less we are likely to feel after a while.
Let us hope that Swapnadeep Kundu and the memory of his pain and mortal terror shall not vanish under this cumulus of words and images.
Bio:
Ananya Dutta Gupta teaches at Visva-Bharati and also writes research articles, essays, travelogues and poetry.
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