Truth-Making in the Digital

In the early 1990s, there were only an estimated six landline phones for every 1,000 Indians. By 2026, estimates forecast that the country will house one billion smartphone users. The nation has increasingly turned to these devices for both the reception and dissemination of information - to the extent that the 2019 parliamentary election was termed ‘the WhatsApp election’.? Given this overwhelming reminder that we are indeed in the ‘digital age’, how does it affect politics as usual??

According to research by the Carnegie Endowment, modern Indian political campaigns strategically leverage content-complementarity — a two-way relationship between online and in-person campaigning. An in-person rally is provided with increased longevity, because it has both a pre-rally buzz generated across social media platforms, as well as a post-rally showcase of turnout and sound-bytes. Essentially, it is a level of performance that neither digital nor physical can attain individually.

The 2024 elections, in a recent piece by the Oxford Internet Institute, may come to be known as the ‘YouTube elections’, given its role as a key outlet for journalistic coverage. The growth of outlets? like the Wire, Scroll, Newslaundry, Mooknayak, News Minute and Article 14 after the 2014 elections have created an impactful set of alternatives to existing traditional news channels. Most of these outlets are available only digitally – with articles and videos also posted on platforms such as YouTube and Instagram. ?This is also the first nationwide election being held after the Information Technology Rules, 2021. Therefore, what we have is a constantly multiplying pot of mis/information, distributed across a constantly multiplying grid of non/credible channels, influencing how we consume, think and act. Within this context, who gets to make the truth??

An extremely relevant example here is Truth Social, a platform that describes itself as America’s “Big Tent” social media platform that encourages an open, free, honest, global conversation without discriminating on the basis of political ideology. The platform allows users to share their own individual “truths” – and even includes a “Compose Truth” function for posts. Though the influence of Truth Social has been negligible, researchers see its launch as an influential moment in the current age. Truth has always been shaped by some infrastructure or other, say digital anthropologists Bareither and Harder. Today, digital infrastructures, specifically social media, allow for the balance of truth to shift across various anchors and actors – creating trajectories that can sometimes veer out of control. COVID, for example, saw the proliferation of hoaxes, misinformation and scientific myth-busting, to the extent that scholars refer to it as an ‘infodemic’. It highlighted the immediacy with which truths about the body, health and disease merged with ideas of autonomy, mobility and freedom.

“In both digital and non-digital spaces, truth is often a matter of personal conviction; it is about what feels right for individual actors embedded in particular social and cultural dynamics”, Bareither and Harder put forth. Therefore, it is not the platforms that are changing the world, but the users: the content they believe in, create and share. They emphasize that one of the central strengths of digital anthropology is that it never sees the human-technological relationship in isolation. In fact, the aforementioned concept of complementarity is determining how this relationship progresses – we learn from technology and it learns from us. However, within this dynamic, it is important to focus on how truth is learned, and more importantly, shaped and circulated. As we scan exit polls and majorities, sweeps and swings, we need to ask ourselves: whose truth do we want to live?

Paths explores topical developments at the intersection of culture, business, technology, and society. Each month we delve into a concept, unpack it through an interdisciplinary lens, and present alternate ways of looking at it for our readers: alternative paths. Want to know more about our work? Reach out to us on?[email protected]?or head to?www.lagomworks.com