Today it seems that Bloomberg is two media outlets in one. In the previous piece I cited David Fickling argued that information is good, at least when it’s in the hands of the Chinese. In this article at Bloomberg Pankaj Mishra certainly seems to be arguing that information in the hands of Indians is bad:
The smartphone in India is also sparking earthshaking transformations in private and public life. To hundreds of millions of young and poor Indians, the device offers their first — and exhilaratingly simultaneous — experience of a camera, computer, television, music player, video game, e-reader and the internet. The smartphone compresses a timeline of technological advances that in the West took centuries — from the invention of letterpress printing to the advent of photography, radio, television, personal computer and modem – into just a few years.
A social and political revolution accompanied these technological leaps in the West: For instance, a rising middle class empowered by the printing press cracked open the exclusive world of a tiny literati.
India today is witnessing an even more drastic shift in class power. Anyone with a smartphone possesses the means to express an opinion and disseminate it far and wide, not only bypassing but also confronting the traditional elite of political representatives, technocrats and opinion makers in the media.
The experience offers few reasons to believe that faster communications will encourage greater democracy and freedom globally. Fake news, spread through WhatsApp and Facebook, has already fueled lynch-mob murders in India. It now threatens to influence India’s ongoing general elections just as decisively as it did the Brazilian elections late last year.
Smartphone owners are constantly exposed to high volumes of information and disinformation — both of which have a misleadingly uniform digital texture. One obvious result is the weakening of analytic ability — the capacity to distinguish between the essential and the inessential, truth and untruth.
And when state education is poor, private education largely a con and competition fierce for even menial jobs, conditions are ripe not for revolution, as Marxists like to believe, but for a mass exodus into the smartphone’s screen.
Demagogic politicians adept at social media such as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro can only benefit when politics blends with entertainment, and campaign commercials as well as Bollywood videos flash forth from the same portable screen.
I think that I can reconcile these two apparently conflicting positions.
The ease of dissemination of information when every citizen has a sound and video recording device, a library, and a communications device in his or her pocket has simultaneously rendered secrecy virtually impossible, removed the ability of politicians to control the messages that people are hearing, and exposed just how greatly they have been working against the people’s wishes but rather in their own interests. This tool has not created opinions; it has revealed long-held opinions.
Here’s a wacky suggestion. If politicians want to be treated like philosopher-kings they damn well should start acting like philosopher-kings, beginning with austerity in their own lives. They can’t hide any more and it will only become more difficult with each passing year.
You cannot combat vice with even greater vice. You combat it with virtue and that cannot be faked.
I think that your interpretation here is overly optimistic when you say this. “removed the ability of politicians to control the messages that people are hearing”
Sure, some stuff leaks out that politicians dont want us to know, but at least in the US it looks to me like the political class controls the message better than ever. I think it is pretty clear that when you get down to it, both parties pretty much suck, yet you find people more firmly entrenched than ever into the red and blue camps. People in the red camp believe and defend everything that Trump does or says. We certainly saw much the same when Obama was POTUS (though Democrats did not have to defend such extreme behaviors). There are whole media set up on both sides to promote the messages that the politicians want sent out. I think that when you compare that to the occasional release of negative information, which largely seems to have little effect, I end up thinking that I wish you were correct, but I just dont see it.
That said, maybe things are different in India, but I doubt it. I doubt that a bunch of people with their first smartphones are going to not fall for the sophisticated messaging campaigns of the professional political class.
Steve
But there’s competition now. There are other “sophisticated messaging campaigns” from people who aren’t part of the professional political class. That was one of the lessons of the 2016 presidential campaign here.
Makes me think about Tiger Woods comment at 16 after his first Master’s win, “Well, hello world”. Turns out not just a wonderfully fresh thing for a young champion to say, but the slogan Nike had paid him to say.
In the same vein, when Joe Leiberman suggested that A.O.C. was not representative of the Democratic party, she tweeted, “? NEW party, who dis?”
Turns out New Party is the name of the PAC which selected, elected, and feeds her lines. When she threatened to count votes and target Democratic Representatives in the primaries, this was New Party’s threat she revealed, not her own.
We’ll have to not just read between the lines, but look behind the curtain. Whether Representative Democracy can survive the new tech rides on that.
“There are other “sophisticated messaging campaigns†from people who aren’t part of the professional political class. That was one of the lessons of the 2016 presidential campaign here.”
And those other “sophisticated messaging campaingns” just reinforced the old ones. We still ended up with Trump and Clinton.
Steve
Let me try to articulate it more clearly. Trump is not a member of the professional political class. His sophisticated messaging campaign routed the conventional Republicans and ultimately prevailed against the consummate insider, Hillary Clinton.
Otherwise President Hillary Clinton would have defeated Republican challenger Jeb Bush in 2016.
And it’s not just Trump. Upstarts are ousting or upstaging party perennials among the Democrats too. The nomenklatura can hold on to their jobs but the rules have changed.
I’m not claiming it’s good merely that it is. The egg cannot be unbroken.
We will probably end up disagreeing, but let me explain also. As far as I can tell no new messaging system was created by Trump and team. They always had the support of of Fox, arguably the most influential conservative media. Remember that Trump had run before and he was very well connected to conservative politics. Essentially all of the “lowbrow” conservative also supported Trump from the beginning.
So, I dont think this was about new media, it was just the talk radio and cable TV supporting Trump from the start, and once the rest of the conservative media realized Trump was going to win they fell in line. (You have to remember that Limbaugh, Hannity, Ingraham, Levin, Coulger, etc have been around for a long time. Breitbart had been around for a decade. All of those are part of the professional messaging class. I cant think of any major instances of a new messaging group that sprang up to spread Trump’s message. Using Twitter? Remember that Republicans called Obama the Twitter president. So, I see nothing new, just a politician capturing existing structures. Unless you want to count the Russian efforts, LOL.)
Steve