Social Media's seamy side may make Netas' revisit political communication
Chennai: Disturbing reports about the former President Dr APJ Abdul Kalam’s twitter handle being allegedly misused after his demise, coming out shortly after the third death anniversary of the ‘Missile Man’ on July 27, has again brought to the fore the seamy side of what goes under the broad rubric of ‘social media’.
From the era of the morning magic of the print media, then television channels metaphorically invading your drawing and bed rooms, to the instant flashes now that Internet-based communication technology has enabled for anyone to post short messages and other forms of content on social media, there has been a radical democratization of communication.
From the days of state-monopolised officially verified/authenticated information being disseminated to the larger public, millions of individuals world over, overcoming barriers of distance, gender, caste and religion, are now finding an utterance for what their ‘souls’ wish to say, though ironically in a much more fast-money driven business world.
‘Love thy neighbour’ is no longer religious wisdom amid mob lynching. It is now, thanks to the negative or seamy side of social media, which can be a mine-field in itself vis-a-vis the depths of abuse and trolling that even otherwise critical brave hearts can hardly digest, the dialectic of prejudices, emotive and ideological presuppositions all play out on the web. The good old community ‘neighbour’ has been banished into an ethereal world, while the huge “following” on Twitter, Facebook and the like have now redefined the very notion of street jabs and village gossips. Ears have gone beyond walls, from our wise grandma’s advice, ‘walls have ears’.
The more the network sites and newer the computer-based applications, ‘social media’, in principle and reality, is constantly expanding like our Upanishadic ‘Brahman’ - the ultimate we were told literally means ‘bursting forth’-. The expansion of people’s communicative frontiers it has enabled is a big boon. As they say, “to know Brahman is to become Brahman.” But the process, unfortunately and unwittingly, is tagged on to a profound irony: greater insularity of defined groups, brushing aside ‘basic, facts’ that for centuries have made any human communication meaningful.
The American logician and philosopher’s famously defining ‘fact’, as “it is raining, if and only if it is raining”, is not a tautology to be thrown into the dustbins of communicative history. It is part of what late Prof Ramchandra Gandhi would call “Presuppositions of Human Communication”. Tarski himself had to, with great labour, articulate the logic of that baseline notion of ‘truth’ or ‘fact’ in the cultural backdrop of Nazism and fascism “seizing” the so-called “domain of facts” for ‘manipulative/control’ communication.
It is in this backdrop that the alleged misuse of ‘twitter handle’ of a truly humane and secular visionary persons like Dr Abdul Kalam after his demise, raises concerns. Perhaps, great leaders of our freedom struggle like Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and others were lucky not to be in the age of ‘Twitter’, that their Spartan and poetic ways of political communication have lived on, thanks to the still ‘immortal’ printed word.
What could be an instant ‘revolutionary relish’ in being able to reach out to the world in just 140 characters, is not what politics and political communication is all about. In a brief delicious indolence, one tried re-imagining the 1940s and 1950s’ political world of the erstwhile Madras State and its tall leaders.
The late rationalist leader Periyar managed to convey much more game-changing social and political content through his Weekly ‘Kudi Arasu’ published from a little yet prosperous town of Erode. Almost all early fiery leaders of both the Congress and the Dravidian Movement had used the art of public speaking and effective at times literary writing to convey their ideas. What leaders like Satyamurthi, or Dr Muthulakshmi Reddy spoke either in the then Provincial Assembly or the National Assembly, had far-reaching implications, the fruits of which we enjoy even today.
Without being compulsively judgmental, a great leader like Rajaji, despite his political controversies, left behind a noble text on the relevance of basic human values and virtues through his re-telling of the great epics of ‘Ramayana’ and the ‘Mahabharata’. That was a cultural contribution not necessarily traditional and with no tinge of any religious fundamentalism. Kamaraj’s inimitable one-word ‘Paarkalam’ was equal to a thousand words.
Again the DMK, though it used theatre and cinema to propagate its social and ideological policies, grew on an oral tradition fostered by a critical mass of public speakers - from C N Annadurai, Perasiriyar K. Anbazhagan, Naavalar Nedunchezhiyan to Kalaignar M Karunanidhi to name a few-, who drew from the proverbial gift of the gab, supplemented by writings in print. Later, Finance Ministers from Tamil Nadu, including P. Chidambaram, would sum up a budget’s context and mood with an apt ‘Thirukkural’ couplet.
A highly charismatic leader like MGR would rather prefer to speak a few words by just showing up his face at a rally or wayside meeting than go on ‘Twitter’ or ‘Facebook’, had he that choice. In fact, his political successor in the AIADMK, J Jayalalithaa, was wary of social media and even openly said that she was not on any such online speak-mode. This is notwithstanding the fact that the AIADMK also has an IT-wing.
Though the DMK President, M Karunanidhi, of late took a fancy for using social media, egged on by the demands of a younger generation, as leader of the party, his focus was always on the “resolutions” that the DMK would pass at every meeting, whether it be big, small or routine, and the content communicated to cadres through the party journal, ‘Murasoli’, much like what the main Left parties have been doing for decades.
The point is that the problems and perspectives that political parties will have to engage with in an evolving democratic society like ours, where income and social inequalities are still of a staggeringly high order, ‘social media’ can at best be like the ‘creamy layer’ in reservation, but not the sum and substance of political/cultural communication itself. Society still needs to respect the privacy of man’s innermost recordings in his/her dairy. The search light of disclosures is a historical process and time should be allowed to play out its duration. That is the best guarantor of Truth as well.
The process of debate and discussion in Legislative Assemblies/Parliament and arriving at a consensus in decision making is still the hope of humane governance, however old-fashioned it might sound. The Dr Kalam digital misuse episode, if true, should make our political class rethink the virtues of what the late outstanding post-Independent Indian Philosopher, Prof. Daya Krishna would call ‘Samvaad’ and its adjunct, ‘open-ended’ dialogues.
