24 September 2021, NIICE Commentary 7377
Anuttama Banerji
The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) the specialized agency of the United Nations for Information and Communications Technology (ICTs) noted that India and China were home to 39 percent young people of the 830 million worldwide who use the internet. These figures point to the growing importance of the internet in two of the fastest developing states in the world.
India has been largely democratic since its independence in 1947 except for a brief period when the Emergency was imposed in India in 1975. The democratic winter lasted until 1977 when fresh elections were called and the Bharatiya Jana Sangh came to power after defeating the Indian National Congress led by Indira Gandhi. The emergency put massive curbs on the freedom of the press, apart from the suspension of fundamental rights of ordinary citizens. Newspapers were a source of information for the citizens and press censorship ensured that the information received by the citizens was vetted by the government of the day. It may be suggested that newspapers influenced the minds of the “imagined community” and informed public opinion and played a role in nation- building in post 1947 India like the colonial state was imagined through the census, map and museum before. The internet is today a part of the “fourth estate” and is influencing public opinion in equal measure.
Public opinion continues to rein supreme in India because individuals lack an opinion and it is this public opinion that the public is made to think as their own opinion. This lack of coherent understanding of what constitutes public opinion, therefore, makes us consumers of this opinion. At this time of political uncertainty, political opinion is being formed through the proliferation of fake news and hate speech content. Websites ShareChat, Helo are littered with misinformation in regional languages Kannada and Hindi while the political propaganda is highly polarized. It is difficult to decipher between the real and the fake because of the nature of the presentation of the content.
Hate speech at the same time, is difficult to define but refers to expressions that advocate incitement to harm—discrimination, hostility, violence—based upon the targets being identified with a certain social or demographic group. It includes speech that advocates, threatens or encourages violent acts.
While ideology was initially believed to create false consciousness, it is now clear that human beings are embedded in existing ideological frameworks since ideology has a material existence and is rooted in existing apparatuses and prevalent practices. For example, the rise of nationalistic sentiment in India at this crucial juncture was a result of “our exposure” to this ideology in the public sphere that is making us perform a specific variant of nationalism in the public sphere much like the notion of gender performativity. The manifestos given by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Indian National Congress (INC) in 2019, point to this battle of ideologies. While the INC had argued in favor of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) and the NYAY scheme, the BJP has tried to gain the support of the voter on issues like nationalism and growing terrorism. Data analytics had become a major point of focus for all political parties with parties hiring poll strategists to get an insight into the mind of the voter. The data collected is then used to create the “personalized digital universe” where the voters scroll through information that is generated for their use based on their personal surfing of the internet. This entire process of manufacturing consent from the voter led to the voter becoming a “digital ideologue” who instinctively became a practitioner of an ideological variant unknowingly. In the end, the creation of a parallel universe for the voters impacts their vote in the polling booth.
If this narrative holds true, then it is essential to construct a counter narrative. In lieu of this fact, increased digital literacy and local language content development becomes important and Ankhi Das, former Public Policy Head of Facebook, India argued that “Digital literacy skills need to be made available to large swathes of the analogous world,” so that better governance in this digitized world becomes a reality. It is imperative that the real world hidden by ideology somewhat comes to the forefront since a complete exposure to reality may never be possible because language does not reflect reality and it is our reliance on language that makes it difficult for us to access the real conditions of our existences, since truth is context dependent.
Thus, technology continues to influence decision making and hate speeches and local language content is being used to influence people on political and economic issues which is turning the voter into a ‘digital ideologue’ in the contemporary data age. Websites like Facebook, Whatsapp, Youtube, ShareChat and Helo are being tacitly used to popularize existing ideological narratives suitable to various political parties to influence the voter. Truth continues to be evasive since we continue to function within existing ideological frameworks in our digital universe.
