Fighting the internet: Rebel against the screens a bit

Gadfly

If literature today is likened to wildlife, then poetry would be its most endangered species, because in the Insta age, everyone is a ‘poet’. By extension, all are artists, comics, and musicians. Yes, the internet and social media have democratised conversation. But they have blurred notions of meaning, value, criterion. Anything flies now. No matter how slanted the yardsticks of the past were, they have been dismantled. If all manner of social and cultural elite groups manned the gates of ‘culture’ once, to a degree, it’s a free-for-all now. Of course, this has happened due to the internet-overdosed smartphone. There’s no doubt that older controls over art, music, literature and journalism are being broken. The question now is, how are we to know how to isolate the chaff from the grain in our blink-and-you-will-miss-it times? How do we assess the quality of art or information?

In fields like journalism, media expansion has ushered in diversity. Across many languages, the mainstream (also, legacy) media can no longer ignore the many glaring or subtle blind spots of our public life. Especially over matters of social inequity. Till some time ago, many of the upper castes and men who dominated the profession were perhaps less inclined to examine caste or gender with a steady focus. To an extent, they got away with it then, but their organisations now no longer can. Some lesser known, but credible, news site will go where none of the big media have yet, over some raging but less explored story that illumines our national condition. Yes, we have fake news and malicious misinformation and disinformation, too. But the advances enabled by the internet have outweighed the downsides.

In the field of books, self-publishing and digital publishing and a range of new kinds of presses with foci on the margins of our consciousness, have taken off breaking through standards in the world of letters that were in the grip of niche groups. For instance, Dalit publishing and media in India have disrupted the peace over caste. They’ve been at the forefront of questioning the metropolitan and mainstream coverage of events as reservation in education and employment, events like the Bhima-Koregaon marches, and many matters that go back a long way. They’ve been unrelenting in calling out entrenched media over their open or invisible partialities.

These are portals that dissent against the perceptions of previous generations and sections of the current one. While much of our mainstream media still reflects the concerns of dominant pockets of society, the talk-back from other media counterweighs them. Something similar obtains now in the spheres of creative work. Since the outlets to display one’s work, whether it’s a painting, a drawing, a poem, or short story, have widened and come to us in the form of a click or two, the older ways of appraising them, have caused much muddling, because every classic work of art or literature may now be compared to some middling web series. How do we retain th passion for the riches of the past and handle the flux of the present?

It’s necessary that individuals begin having a critical distance from the lures of the uber-tech age. Even as it grants us high-quality knowledge that was not accessible before, the smartphone’s addiction inducing capabilities, attention span-killing powers, sleep pattern ravaging, and the utter absence of parameters, make it the marauder of the life of the mind in our time. To understand where we are as humans in the world, one must make a concerted effort to engage with the best of the warts-and-all pre-internet past. That will need switching off. Reflection requires slowing down.

Once, we did not have the means to know many things. But now, portions of humanity do. And so, they stare at multiple open tabs on their devices running from one distraction to another. Unless one has the privilege or just no means, it’s hard to live without staying connected to the Net. Societies, via complex webs of corporations and governments, have let the internet take over their lives. The individual must rebel against the phone, the Net, the screen, the lens, even as they partake of them. A small way to use them well will be to never be on them all the time.