From smart mobs to trolls online

My colleagues have been studying some of the smart mobs that were organised here in India (flash mobs where people land up at local train stations and dance in public, political smart mobs where people gather at a locality to protest against something and so on). The smart mob is something that India has taken to on a huge scale and intensity. But you cannot say that India has aped other countries. We are only seeing that as more and more global conversations happen on the back of digital as a medium. Countries around the world are learning from each other. In America too, Bollywood music and dance has made an entry into reality show programming. In a university in Warsaw, there is a Bollywood film society and that despite there not being too many Indian students in that university. Social media has amplified the scale and speed at which cultural exchanges take place.

In India, companies such as Culture Machine and groups such as AIB have figured a method to create content that is topical and travels fast through the social media. There are ongoing conversations online that provide breakthroughs and perspectives that we might not have seen otherwise.

Years ago Marshall McLuhan said “the medium is the message”. If you ask what is the message with Twitter, there are two messages: “Here it is!” and “Here I am”. ‘Here it is’ becomes the message when you share a link to something that you want the world to see and ‘Here I am’ is about sharing what you did last evening, what your dog did, and so on. They are both about connecting people to each other and bringing out ideas that would not circulate otherwise.

Every day, people are not necessarily trading ideas, they are sharing experiences. They are keen to show what they are doing. Pop stars are forming relationships with their fans through social media which later translates to sales of their labels or people buying tickets for their concerts and so on. Every fan might drive 20-30 people to that experience, every time they tweet. Imagine how this plays out in India where film stars have had such larger-than-life personalities.

The pictorial – whether it’s comics or memes or YouTube videos – will always be very important in countries where languages are a problem. Any thing you do pictorially will see an exchange across languages. We are also seeing that video is a much bigger medium in the US than a lot of people thought. We interviewed more than 200 young activists and discovered that video sharing is far more important than Twitter in their ability to gather support for their ideas. The ability to dramatise and document issues and put them into circulation on video is allowing young activists a voice that’s completely different than Twitter. Two or three minutes through video allows you to do a lot more than 140 characters.

We need to make a distinction between gossip and slander – while they can be the same thing, they are not always so. Gossip is a basic human need. When you and I meet, we need to understand what our shared values are and we do so by talking about other people as examples of good and bad behaviour. Gossip need not necessarily be malicious. In the US reality television provides people an opportunity to gossip and make our judgement on the stars. But slander is where we are attacking people in a direct way. What has happened in the last couple of years is large mob behaviour where people are attacked again and again on social media by a reactionary set of society. That’s becoming a global issue with social media.

People are trying to understand how to bring empathy back into some of those conversations. There are very few up-standers (people who stand up for those who are attacked by the online mobs). We have expanded dramatically the capacity to communicate, but we have not developed the norms alongside on how to use that responsibly.

When there is freedom people are going to break all rules till they realise the consequences of their actions. I compare that to a young person who is moving away from home for the first time. You are going to break a bunch of rules that your parents taught you. But you will soon realise that if you broke those rules every night you are not going to keep your job and survive very long.

I hope similar sense will prevail online and people will learn to use their freedom responsibly. I am personally anti-censorship. We should learn to self-regulate, because if there is censorship we might lose out on different perspectives and points of view.

Professor Jenkins was in India to talk about participatory culture, media convergence, transmedia storytelling, spreadability and more at the Godrej India Culture Lab.

(As told to Prasad Sangameshwaran)

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