A Digital Kind of Change?

A few weeks ago, I happened to come face to face with the popularity of youtube star Superwoman aka Lily Singh as she spoke in front of a swooning crowd of young fans. I had heard of her and seen a couple of her videos, but hadn’t quite grasped the enormity of her stardom. I was not alone in my ignorance, for on asking around I found that the world was neatly divided between hysterical fans and clueless others.

As a whole new breed of stars is born on digital media, the divide between the worlds of mainstream media and its digital counterpart is only growing. Conventional media constructs a sense of the public by offering the same content to all; this creates common currencies of knowledge, popularity and fame. The content transmitted reaches this public automatically- people see it because it is on television and it becomes what we all know. In the digital world, things become public one individual at a time, and not because of the power of the central transmission. The recent controversy over the AIB roast is a case in point. In the eyes of the elective public created by the digital medium, the AIB show excited comment more than controversy but when the story went ‘public’ in the more mainstream sense, it collided with a more traditional mindset.

The relative obscurity of the digitally famous is only part of a much larger narrative of change that surrounds the world being created by digital. The idea of having a new arena which is both public and protected, with virtually infinite depth and seamless connectivity that can be customized completely according to one’s whims, fancies and needs is a truly liberating one.

Apart from consuming content relating to the more conventional areas of interest such as cinema, cricket and music, a vast array of different kind of subjects and formats are becoming common place. From video blogs, comedy sketches, social experiments of all kinds, parodies, make up and lifestyle tips, issues dealing with sex and sexuality, technology reviews, memes featuring combinations of visuals and messages, whatsapp groups that share jokes, recipes, political messages and more, the world of digital content is a truly diverse one. Sometimes, the strangest content becomes viral- random wedding videos chalk up half a million views, a video showing a girl start a motorcycle with her hand received 7.5 million views!

What is most significant about this is that so much of the material is created by users themselves. Material from their everyday lives is being fed back to the world in the form of content. The world is being grasped at ground level and a new set of rules and codes is gradually taking shape. This is sense-making of a new kind- a vocabulary and a rule-book more directly applicable to the lives of the people involved are being developed.

What kind of changes will these new forces unleash? The changes brought about by liberalization had a lot to do with giving shape and form to the idea of a coherent middle class and conventional mass media played a vital role in making this change possible. The forces of change were themselves of an aggregating nature- new international brands, television programmes with mass audiences, stars with strong mainstream appeal, cricket and Sachin Tendulkar, blockbusters that told tales of a grand reconciliation between tradition and modernity, 24 X 7 news channels that helped create a sense of the national. The change unleashed by these was of a complex nature but it was possible to grasp some broad themes- the shift in the source of identity from the past to the present, the new belief in the possibility of mobility, the construction of a ladder of aspirations enabled by consumption and so on.

But the change that is being effected by digital and social media in particular has a very different structure to it. Digital change has no intrinsic need to be coherent or even visible, as it pushes outwards from each individual. The pattern of change is likely to be uneven and more unpredictable, and old ways of classifying differences and ascribing causality may not apply quite as much. The kind of education one has received, the size of town one lives in, the kind of family one comes from – all of these might play a less reliable role in locating an individual in any social matrix.

Digital media in India, has been like millions of tiny little bombs going off underground, with the mainstream on the surface feeling only mild tremors and seeing only the occasional craters left by events like the AIB roast, but in the mobile phones of millions nestle stories of subversion, diversion and seduction, the public effect of which is difficult to estimate.

Massive pipelines of communication have been laid, a whole new sewage system of ideas is in place, and even for those plugged in, there is no possibility of being aware of even a fraction of all that is happening- the nature of the medium ensures that. It has its own version of the mainstream but structurally it is simply too fragmented to be neatly assembled in the way mass media can be.

What kind of society does such decentralized peer-to-peer interaction promote? Does it dismantle prejudice or aggregate it? Have private thoughts, secretly whispered confidences, politically incorrect opinions, muttered words of vicious hatred and hotly re-circulated gossip been allowed legitimate entry into the mainstream of our lives? Will the cleave between the socially legitimate and the personally acceptable widen or will it narrow? Is the digital medium silently and subversively constructing the idea of the individual? What we are seeing or rather not seeing is a pattern of change that is deeply unfamiliar. Not only are things changing but the nature of change is itself changing.

( A version of this post has appeared in the Times of India)