SOCIAL media made its debut as a symbol of the zeitgeist four years ago. In 2006, Time magazine’s person of the year was ‘You’. ‘You’, was you, the new netizen journalist, the solitary uploader of raw feed, the cruiser on the world wide web or the new Web 2.0, the data dumper for whom the rules of conventional journalism did not apply, the amateur musician or the novelist by night who armed with a camera or simply a story to tell, uploads experience, reportage, pictures and commentary onto YouTube, Facebook, the blogosphere or MySpace and is transformed almost instantly into an online legend. ‘It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes,’ wrote Lev Grossman in Time.

Powered by the world wide web, the new social media seemed invincible. In 2010, the year in which Wikileaks and the Radia Tapes gripped public attention, the social media or alternate media or new media seemingly established itself as the weapon of a potential media revolution, the forum of individual subversion against the establishmentarian old world press or a so-called voice of the people pushing at the self-imposed limits of the conventional media.

The information explosion on the net is creating an insatiable, voracious appetite to know more than what is considered worthy of revelation. The gatekeepers of news and information are being pushed back by a surging crowd that no longer believes in gates or their keepers. The whistle-blower, armed with the power of the internet, the everyman online activist with access to information that no newspaper will publish, the forums of information dissemination, organizational capability and campaign publicity available on Twitter, Face-book and YouTube – are together increasingly providing a democratic conversation echoing with far more discordant voices than any civilized debate.

It is an online parliament or echo chamber where voices outlandish to sober, abusive to constructive, coexist – voices which may not yet have the power to change the way events unfold, but will certainly force decision-makers to constantly tune in. Mark Zuckerberg, 26-year-old founder of Facebook, has just been declared the Time magazine’s ‘person of the year’ for 2010. US Vice President Joe Biden has called 39-year-old Julian Assange, the editor in chief of Wikileaks, a terrorist, even though his admirers describe him as the internet’s Robin Hood. In India, the government is considering a privacy law that can protect the citizen against leaks and what industrialist Ratan Tata in his privacy petition to the Supreme Court has called ‘character assassination’ in the Radia Tapes. On Twitter and Face-book, the chorus is unanimous. In the war against corruption in all its forms, the public’s right to know overrides the citizen’s right to privacy.

 

In fact, privacy in the age of social media is almost nonexistent. Elizabeth Hurley and Shane Warne carried out their extramarital flirtation on Twitter and even broke up with their respective partners by announcing it on Twitter! Former Congress Minister Shashi Tharoor’s resignation drama started with a tweet from Lalit Modi. In fact, Twitteroor’s much publicized tweets had already robbed the External Affairs Ministry of much of its secrecy. The power of social media is also evident in the fact that Lalit Modi himself gave his first interview post the IPL fracas, not to a newspaper or channel but to YouTube.

Yet the hype and hosannas about the power of the alternate media may be a little premature. Alternate media is almost totally dependent on mainstream media to disseminate its message. Wikileaks, after all, had to rely on five venerable media outlets – New York Times, Le Monde, El Pais, The Guardian and Der Spiegel for the cables to have any lasting impact. The Radia Tapes would very probably have been lost in the internet hullabaloo had they not been published by mainstream magazines Outlook and Open and their content debated on national television channels. The sheer inchoate nature of the internet babble is still no substitute for a hard-hitting focused piece of old fashioned investigative journalism, as shown in the mainstream media’s relentless reportage on the irregularities in allocation of 2G spectrum, which culminated in the resignation of Telecom Minister A. Raja.

 

Alternate media may be bursting with personal adventures, blogs, data, insta-reports and 100 word opinions, but it remains a maverick player in the realm of the Fourth Estate, its lawless energy impactful but devoid of the power to bring genuine change. In India, the day that a blog or a Twitter or Facebook campaign will bring down a minister is still far away. Much of the outpourings on Twitter and Face-book remain to some extent frivolous, trivial, not to mention defamatory, and no match for a structured objective credible news report or opinion available in newspapers or national channels.

Unlike in the United States where bloggers are given the same status as print and electronic journalists and invited to White House briefings, internet journalism still has no independent existence in India. The low level of net connectivity, dependence on the same sources of news and information as print and electronic outlets, the fact that netizens are mostly enthusiastic amateurs rather than professional writers and journalists and the fact that mainstream media outlets have harnessed online forums extremely effectively, has made social media a subsidiary of mainstream media.

In a sharply argued piece in the London Review of Books, James Harkin writes, ‘There is now an irrational exuberance about the potential of social media: it’s as if online social networking could rescue the media, restore democracy and liberate the wretched of the earth, one tweet at a time.’ Harkin gives several examples of the Twitter revolution. He shows how a Colombian Facebook group, ‘One Million Voices Against FARC’, was created in Barranquilla in 2008 to campaign against the guerrillas; how in April 2009, protestors in Chisinau, capital of Moldova, organized street protests against vote rigging through Twitter. And he describes in detail the most famous example of the Twitter revolution, which was the Iranian agitation against the disputed presidential election of 2009 when supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi effectively used Twitter and Facebook to defy state control on the media, organize demonstrations, relay images of brutality by the state police and achieve far reaching global solidarity. At that time euphoria about Twitter was high, with commentators writing that the internet is ‘the critical tool of resistance in Iran’ and that the ‘Revolution will be twittered.’

 

But Harkin is also deeply sceptical about the social media. He believes that far from the social media being the lightning rod of democratization of information, it can actually become a weapon of conservative right-wing propaganda, a means for authoritarian regimes to keep a watch on their citizens, and in places like Iraq, Google and Twitter are in danger of becoming identified with the objectives of the American state department. He believes that social media is creating a new kind of social control; even the Kremlin has cultivated young bloggers to aggressively propagate conspiracy theories on the internet and create the perception of a supposed threat about Russia’s sovereignty being in danger.

While social media may be a powerful organizational device, its so called freedom is illusory because while there is a vibrant internet culture in Iran and even a gay blogosphere, Ahmedinejad’s followers are also on Facebook and Twitter and social media is equally a weapon to crush dissent, monitor protestors and propagate orthodox ideologies.

 

This is particularly true of India. Today the RSS has a Facebook page with a growing number of ‘friends’, a page used to disseminate the RSS version of nationalism and history and ‘educate’ young surfers about ‘nationalist’ heroes. Commentators on the page swap ideas on how to protect Indian youth from the virus of secularism and particularly, how to prevent the mainstream media from ‘brainwashing’ youth into ‘pseudo-secular’ thought. Twitter is also used by effectively organized groups of ‘nationalists’ who wage a Twitter war against the same ‘pseudo-secular’ media through daily and well organized tweets. Arguably, far from Twitter being a forum of healthy debate, it is often highly abusive, trading insults between rival political formations.

As the columnist George Monbiot writes: ‘The internet is a remarkable gift, which has granted us one of the greatest democratic opportunities since universal suffrage. We’re in danger of losing this global commons as it comes under assault from an army of trolls and flacks, many of them covertly organized or trained. The question for all of us – websites, everyone who benefits from this resource – is what we intend to do about it. It’s time we fought back and reclaimed the internet for what it does best: exploring issues, testing ideas, opening the debate.’

Yet the Tower of Babel personified in Twitter and Facebook still leaves open the debate and remains a powerful means to convey what is construed as ‘public opinion’, spread awareness and generate an enormous amount of feedback to news stories as well as to the conduct of individual media organizations and journalists. For short periods in 2008 and 2009, the phone of the head of the PR company Vaishnavi Communications Niira Radia was placed under surveillance by the Income Tax Department. Radia’s phone was tapped, in a governmental procedure that many have subsequently found to be dubious, in order, according to the government, to investigate corruption and tax violation allegations against Radia.

Subsequently, in a process as yet unclear, the transcripts of those conversations were ‘leaked’ to the media and two mainstream magazines, Outlook and Open, published them. In a mix of gossip, loose talk and influence peddling, the conversations revealed that Niira Radia was speaking to and lobbying with corporate leaders, DMK politicians, industry representatives and journalists to try and secure the prized Telecom ministry for DMK leader A. Raja as well as trying to ‘plant’ favourable columns and news reports in the media on behalf of her clients, industrialists Ratan Tata and Mukesh Ambani. In addition to published transcripts, Outlook and Open also uploaded the now infamous Radia Tapes onto their websites.

 

The Radia Tapes created a veritable storm in the social media. The fact that high profile mainstream journalists, Vir Sanghvi and Barkha Dutt, featured in the conversations with Radia in a manner suggesting a high level of proximity that many argued did not befit senior journalists, created Twitter and Facebook campaigns demanding that the mainstream media debate the conversations and that Sanghvi and Dutt be forced out of their jobs. Dutt particularly became the focus of attack on Facebook and Twitter, with groups demanding an apology from her and punitive action from her channel, NDTV.

The Twitter and Facebook campaigns had two aspects. The first was a welcome nudge to the mainstream media to break the omerta on the role of media colleagues and introspect openly about the crisis in mainstream journalism and the manner in which journalists have become all too vulnerable to the corporate and political class. But the second aspect of the social media campaign was that it was openly abusive, defamatory and focused on a shrill attack against individuals. Sadly, social media did not offer any meaningful debate on the blurring of lines between journalism and lobbying or the very real dangers of media corporatization or the subversion of journalism by cronyism. The social media attack remained focused on Sanghvi and Dutt; there was even a Facebook-organized public burning of their effigies in Mumbai, but ignored in the mainstream media, the protests went unnoticed.

 

In fact, civilized debate is at a premium on social media sites. To quote Monbiot again: ‘I love debate, and I often wade into the threads beneath my columns. But it’s a depressing experience, as instead of contesting the issues I raise, many of those who disagree bombard me with infantile abuse, or just keep repeating a fiction, however often you discredit it. This ensures that an intelligent discussion is almost impossible, which appears to be the point.’ In the case of the Radia Tapes, Facebook and Twitter have thus not created a neutral forum of debate on media; instead they have become the forum to ventilate a collective hatred against Barkha Dutt in particular and the mainstream media in general. The lead in the attack has been taken by the self-styled ‘nationalist’ netizens for whom the Radia Tapes are yet another instance of the evils of the ‘pro-Congress’ ‘pseudo-secular’ media.

The recent leaking of the 2,50,000 confidential diplomatic cables on the whistleblower website Wikileaks has been hailed as a victory of new media. John Naughton writes in The Guardian, ‘The Wikileaks revelations represent the first really sustained confrontation between the established order and the culture of the internet. There have been skirmishes before, but this is the real thing.’ Wikileaks has shown, according to Naughton, that the US-Anglo-European adventure is doomed, that the Karzai regime is as corrupt and as incompetent as the South Vietnamese regime was in the 1970s when the US was propping it up, and that the prospects of turning Afghanistan into a viable state are dim. The fact that all this has been revealed to the public, in far more stark and clear terms than any government leader would ever have communicated, is precisely why the Wikileaks revelations are so valuable.

 

The fact that US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who has herself often spoken openly on the power of free flow of information and strongly attacked China’s attempts to block Google, is now in the forefront of the attempt to silence Julian Assange, shows that western governments are increasingly being challenged not by a co-opted elite media reliant on the government for information, but that the real challenge to state authority comes from the freelance whistle-blower on the internet. It is they who serve the public’s right to know far better than established media groups.

In an article in Der Spiegel, one of the media outlets that partnered Wikileaks, Thomas Darnstadt writes that states are permitted to keep secrets, but citizens are also permitted to disclose those secrets. Every hurler of data, according to Darnstadt, enjoys the same status as the press does, even though the press does its job after cross-checking, explaining and contextualizing and its constitutional freedom exists because of its responsibility. The inchoate mass of data without context or assessment or cross-checking may be initially exciting, but is just too anarchic and detailed for the public to digest or comprehend and thus may not even be very impactful. The leaks are thus less dangerous than the US government’s response.

Darnstadt writes, ‘The hunt for Wikileaks is a greater danger to democracy than any information that Wiki-leaks might reveal.’ Indeed, as far as revelations are concerned, Wikileaks has been hardly all that sensational. Rahul Gandhi’s statements to the American ambassador that Hindu terror groups are as dangerous as the Lashkar may have created momentary political polarization, but is hardly new given the wide-ranging investigations that already are in progress against Hindu extremist outfits.

 

Other revelations from Wikileaks are the following: That the Jamaat-ud-Dawa continues to operate and raise funds in Pakistan. Pakistan’s intentions are not clear in banning JuD or implementing UN sanctions. At Islamabad’s behest, China blocked efforts in the UNSC to slap sanctions against JuD. Hillary Clinton has called India a ‘self-appointed’ UNSC frontrunner. India was deliberately kept out of the Turkey-sponsored conference on Afghanistan to please Pakistan. China and North Korea supply Pakistan’s nuclear programme. It’s also revealed that Riyadh is the world’s largest source of funding for the Afghan Taliban and LeT and US intelligence thinks that North Korea is aiding Iran’s nuclear programme.

Also it is revealed that Obama called David Cameron a ‘lightweight’, Hillary Clinton questioned the mental balance of Argentina’s president, the prince of Abu Dhabi described Zardari as ‘dirty’ and Nawaz Sharif as ‘dangerous’ and Zardari was called a ‘numbskull’ by former UK Defence Staff Chief Jock Stirrup. US cables also called Vladimir Putin an ‘alpha-dog’ and a cable from the US embassy in Tripoli talked about Libyan leader Gaddafi’s ‘reliance’ on his Ukrainian nurse!

 

While these are all highly embarrassing for the US and make the business of diplomacy undeniably difficult, the revelations (apart from the name calling!) have been unearthed before and have been reported on in the mainstream media in detail. The incarceration of Bradley Manning, the US soldier who actually copied the data and sent it to Wikileaks, and the attempts to imprison Assange and shut down Wikileaks should not be the business of democratic governments which pride themselves on a free flow of information, indeed for whom free information is the cornerstone of liberty. Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Steve Coll may have described the activities of Wikileaks as acts of ‘vandalism’ and ‘subversion’; Washington Post may have called Wiki-leaks a criminal organization. Yet, Julian Assange has been elected ‘Rockstar of the Year’ by the Italian edition of Rolling Stone music magazine and almost 600,000 signed an online petition in support of Wikileaks when Assange was imprisoned.

Internet journalism, Twitter, Facebook, a lively and contentious blogosphere are thus the inevitable result of the growing power of the internet and the individual desire to harness it for organization, protest, whistleblowing, propaganda and even thought control. However, the features that make social media exciting are precisely those which rob it of its impact. The 140 character long tweet or the instantly activated Facebook group may be sensational, exciting and echo instantly through the online world, yet the campaigns could peter out like a swiftly blazing firecracker if the mainstream media did not keep the issue on a slow burn.

In India, the figures for internet connectivity vary widely but are still hardly influential enough to pose a challenge to the reach of newspapers and television. According to the World Internet User Statistics, the number of internet users in India is about 81 million, roughly only 6.9 per cent of the total population. Thus, the universe of social media in India is still tiny. Additionally, the fact that every newspaper and broadcaster now uses social media for its own blogs and newsreports shows that the lines between old and new media are being blurred.

The structured, objective and credible reports of the mainstream press are still missing in the new social media and its utility as a source of news is questionable. A bomb blast first reported on Twitter would still need validation from a BBC or CNN. And ‘slacktivists’ – or cyber activists as they are called – may find that ‘crowdsourcing’ or organizing crowds through the net is no substitute for genuine public movements. Social media has taken its place in the democratic array of public forums, with its positive as well as negative aspects; its power of dissemination is undoubted; its capacity to build an egalitarian dialogue between the powerful and the public is clear; yet its freedom is matched by its propaganda potential and its independence is questionable. In India, at least, social media is the forum of an ever-expanding democratic argument, but in itself is hardly the media leader that Time magazine thought it would be four years ago.