Violence in the digital age

A couple of weeks ago, we were debating with a friend how having multiple social media accounts has become a norm. One can often sense when youngsters talk ecstatically about their profile pictures and posts that it perhaps gives them a sense of agency and social validation in the digital world. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have become the common basic denominator of a consciously-crafted digital society, where technology is being penetrated as a vaccine.

Each social networking site caters to the specific aspirations of a class group in society. To a certain extent, one can almost deconstruct the nature of communication in the oral, textual and digital eras. When it was oral communication, we had the feudal landlord. Textual communication was the stuff of the era of colonisers and bureaucrats. The new digital world has altered the social and political process of society and is psychologically engineering a new form of digital democracy that is utterly un-democratic.

‘Digital democracy’ as a term sounds stale, odourless and stoic. The politics of the term needs to be understood as a virtual extension of an Orwellian nightmare — concepts like surveillance, security — because as a society what we are confronting today is a crisis that is not just constitutional but epistemological, especially if we look at the changing nature of violence.

Violence has today become a collective public act, where a mob lynches a ‘suspect’ person based on fake news or a rumour spread through social media groups. It’s a strange situation where the state machinery, like the police, stands as a mere spectator and consumes the violence of the event.

Each day, we hear stories of rape, lynching and murder circulated in our social media groups which are not only communal but are also propagated to dehumanise us to violence. It is as if it’s normal to get lynched, raped and murdered. Maybe in a digital society, this is the new norm of normalcy. Violence almost becomes an act that can be ritualised and considered inevitable. In fact, it has become imperative today to understand the ways in which violence is being democratised, using technology as a tool to spread hate and fear.

The recent event where the BJP Union Minister of State for Civil Aviation Jayant Sinha garlanded seven persons convicted for lynching Alimuddin Ansari in Ramgarh, who were released on bail, is a classic example of the relation between violence, technology and democracy.

As one goes through the reports, one learns that some young men in the spectator crowd filmed this very gory act of public lynching and were laughing and rejoicing as Ansari was being beaten to death. This video became viral and was circulated across social networking sites. One of the recipients to receive the video even as Ansari was being lynched to death was Ansari’s own son Sahaban. As a son, he was horrified and ran out of his house to rescue his father. But as a society, how does one respond to this kind of violence in a digital world?

Violence today seeks a medium for propagation. In the age of information overload, mediums are aplenty, from instant chat to posting on social media, and violence pervades them and stares us in the face from our handheld screens.

Meanwhile, mainstream media reports on violence are impersonal, reduced to an event and objectified. The whole context of the violence is dismissed off in a line when it should delve far deeper into it. One feels we need new ways of reportage on violence and ways to deconstruct these bloodthirsty acts.

Need for civic movement

India is still an experimenting democracy and the vulnerability it faces from the likes of Facebook, Google and WhatsApp is alarming. There is penetration everywhere, as millions across the country are opening up to the online world. The spread of affordable internet, combined with the availability of cheap devices, has basically created users who exercise their liberty to play the anonymous hatemonger, all from the comfort of his/her own couch. The problem is compounded by loose data protection laws which rarely hold anybody accountable.

We need a new civic movement that takes these companies head-on and tears up the pretentious mask under which they hide, whether it is the issue of Cambridge Analytica or of routine data privacy issues.

To say that social media sites are mere technological applications or platforms is to ignore the whole socio-political dimension under which these processes or products operate. It’s time we understood that Facebook, or any other social media site, is a result of the same structure of society that gave us the atom bomb.

Restricting user-freedom is hardly the solution; neither is shifting the onus on users. It is time that the active users of social media stood up against the complacency of these technology corporations and held them accountable. At least this much, we owe to our democracy.

(Sundaresan is an independent researcher in knowledge studies; Balu is a volunteer for Free and Open Source Software forum)