Fall from the grace
Something which goes up will come down. Works for most except something like smoke. Well it seems this is true for Social Media, or the digital media, some would like to call it. After a massive adulation of social media as messiah of democracy, it is time for some mud slinging towards it. There are accusation , may not be unfounded, that social media is being used to manipulate democratic process in the western world. It seems Russian bots, humans or machine who can generate millions of messages of a certain type, were being used to create very targeted social media messages in the US elections. Well the US President denies it, but the intelligence corroborates it. President says, 'Fake news', which has been galore. Mr May has weighed in to shoot barbs at the Russian president for interfering in the Brexit poles. The intelligence agencies of the western worlds credibility is at crossroad. Well, I am reminded of the childhood story, the shepherd shouting Wolf Wolf to fool the villagers, one days meet the real wolf and no one wants to believe it. Over the last sixty years, we have seen how these same intelligence agencies, interfered in the world matters, with a singular excuse that they are protecting the interest of the democracy and at the same time they kept promoting one despot after another.
We have also learnt that, Social media is being used by terrorist to further its causes and spread its poisonous lifeblood through the veins of internet, using the venerable ones on the social media. This is wrong.
However, did we not see this coming?
Lets step back a bit. a decade ago, we were dependent on few news agencies and governments agencies to get the facts. It was suppose to be unbiased reporting of incident. However, many did not see that as bias. Also, how likely was this to be unbiased, if they were either aligned to the government or driven by business goals.
Then came internet media and social media. Democratisation of information. Data was available to all. Computing powers of mobile phones were much higher than personal computers of the nineties. The data is a strange things. It can be made to speak many languages based on how one interprets it. So the same data of an explosion were used to show terrorist bunker blown off and a small village blown off. Which one would a unsuspecting receiver of such an information believe. It depended on the soft believe group one was getting the news from. The hate machine was extremely efficient. The internet was the vascular system, supplying the world its life blood of information. The faith on this system kept increasing. In 2008 we saw the power of common people, uprising resulting in Ukraine. This started with a single post in the facebook page. Then Tahiar square in 2011, gave us the Arab Spring. Everyone loved Social media. It is by the people , for the people, of the people. Is that not what democracy definition as well? So we all thought.
And then we started noticing the role it was playing in terrorism, electioneering.
So why are we surprised and enraged!
We have also learnt that, Social media is being used by terrorist to further its causes and spread its poisonous lifeblood through the veins of internet, using the venerable ones on the social media. This is wrong.
However, did we not see this coming?
Lets step back a bit. a decade ago, we were dependent on few news agencies and governments agencies to get the facts. It was suppose to be unbiased reporting of incident. However, many did not see that as bias. Also, how likely was this to be unbiased, if they were either aligned to the government or driven by business goals.
Then came internet media and social media. Democratisation of information. Data was available to all. Computing powers of mobile phones were much higher than personal computers of the nineties. The data is a strange things. It can be made to speak many languages based on how one interprets it. So the same data of an explosion were used to show terrorist bunker blown off and a small village blown off. Which one would a unsuspecting receiver of such an information believe. It depended on the soft believe group one was getting the news from. The hate machine was extremely efficient. The internet was the vascular system, supplying the world its life blood of information. The faith on this system kept increasing. In 2008 we saw the power of common people, uprising resulting in Ukraine. This started with a single post in the facebook page. Then Tahiar square in 2011, gave us the Arab Spring. Everyone loved Social media. It is by the people , for the people, of the people. Is that not what democracy definition as well? So we all thought.
And then we started noticing the role it was playing in terrorism, electioneering.
So why are we surprised and enraged!
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