1. Read. Copy. Share.
War room: She sat alongside the two most hated people on the team. Earphones plugged in, Tweetdeck open on the left, she powered through her newest article. Three years of experience radiated from her nimble fingers which went cluck-cluck-cluck against the QWERTY keyboard. She knew who wanted to hear what, how they wanted it packaged and why they would share it: 13 Things You Didn’t Know About ______’s Murder. Number Nine Will Make You Cry.
There were four old TVs, placed slightly apart, playing India’s three most popular English News Channels and the leading Hindi News Channel. Everything which aroused remote interest was playing in one of the channels before it quickly appeared on all four, and more significant news appeared as four independent sets of pulsating, red and yellow, creative “Breaking News” headlines – seven to ten words each.
Men and women in the room were tracking the news – Entertainment, Sports, Politics, Crime, Business – and jotting down the catchiest phrases. A quick search on the topic resulted in more results, and one or two phone-calls made them subject-matter experts. Two hours after first watching the news on Television, they would pen an independent article on the topic. Repackaged news made them superstars. Every day. Several times in a day.
Welcome to new age journalism: read, copy, share.
2. Your Opinion versus My Opinion
If you have ever been to a friend’s place, a bar, a café, an office, university or school, or if you inadvertently walk on the road for too long, you will be asked – “What do you think about ____?”
Remember, it is important to have an opinion. You can agree or disagree, but you must take a stance, at least 0.01% to the right or left of center. Also, ignorance isn’t an option in our civilized world. When information is everywhere, only boors don’t know about trending movies, refugee-crises and cool cat videos.
If you think of news as a way towards developing your weltanschauung, you are in an obscure minority. Just like new-age startups dumped revenue for valuation, new-age media has dumped insight for virality. Opinions are in vogue and make for highly marketable content. Given our dependence on society for nourishment, it is likely that you and I field some militant, viral opinions as well.
Let’s drink beer and fight: your opinion versus my opinion.
3. Gatekeepers Of News
We use Facebook every day. Consciously, sub-consciously, unconsciously, awake, asleep, in the bedroom, in the bathroom, in the car, in the plane (where there is no internet), while playing, while working, while eating, while…
Zuckerberg recently spoke about the billionth person on Facebook. In other words, one out of every seven people (with some error) across the world is on the social network. When a network is as ubiquitous as Facebook, it makes sense to fight for Facebook Neutrality – a concept similar to Net Neutrality. But Monopoly Laws haven’t evolved to cover the internet and social media.
Chancellor Zuckerberg’s blue empire is the gatekeeper of information. Today, it is impossible for companies and artists to spread information through their carefully cultivated Pages with lakhs of followers, without paying Facebook a fat commission. In order to be heard, you need to pay the gatekeepers of news.
4. What’s Your Klout Score?
When posed the question in a Harvard Business School interview - “What do you want in life?”, my friend answered, “The same as everybody else: money, power and fame.” (Throw in a bit of love, and you’ve got life figured out.)
Major media houses are looking for people with celebrity status, achievements in popular fields or massive influence on social media. In a way, money automatically begets power and fame, fame generates money and power, and power leads to money and fame. Buy one, get two free.
In such an atmosphere, it is difficult to succeed without a head-start. If you have none of the three, but a potentially world-changing idea, no one will care.
Even the internet’s young content generating and propagating mechanism is ridden with nepotism, much like Bollywood – the bastion of news creation. The tech industry loves its own, and most apps – whether based out of Silicon Valley or Bangalore – have a tendency to lean towards a uniform techno-libertarianism. Such content is often repeated and reinforced, and therefore overrepresented on the platforms where we consume our news. Suddenly, you and I are skewed towards this niche opinion which appears to be the general worldview. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If you are a cricketing-star who writes about love, a pornstar who writes about food, or a billionaire businessman who talks about pets, the industry wants you. There is only one question that matters: What’s your Klout score?
5. Idiots in Pseudo-intellectual Hell
I came. I saw. I shared.
Social media diminishes the intellectual. The internet encourages radical viewpoints which are consistently and violently thrown at the masses with the intention of stirring joy, hatred, melancholy or another primal emotion. The general representative masses are forgotten as fortunes lie in the extremes of society – either in the vulgarities of the rich or in the miseries of the poor. The middle classes want novelty, and news channels happily quench this thirst.
Nice pictures - or better still, videos - have become essential tools in eliciting empathy and stirring our conscience. We can no longer live without this barrage of visual imagery, which we also help propagate.
The pseudo-intellectual is a wonderful consumer, because he/she thinks he/she is choosing to hold certain notions, blissfully unaware of the marketing genius which helps him/her feel that way. Then again, there is a higher pseudo-intellectual who understands this and quips "hey, what is free-will anyway?".
But it is important to note that as long as we have our hands full - full of meaningless gibberish constantly thrown at us - we will never find the time to think. Hundreds of half-digested stories pass through our brains every day, and as long as this happens, we can never truly assimilate them. We will never know genius from lunacy or truth from the impostor. We will remain idiots in pseudo-intellectual hell.
