Verbal 'Dual'

“We are choked with news and starved of history- Durant” -

Elon Musk quoted this on twitter a few days ago while commenting that it is hard to find relatively objective news these days.

Pic courtesy : Wix

Got me pondering over the role of the fourth estate a.k.a media. We expect it to inform people about current, new affairs as factually as possible, right? Except for entertainment & gossip, which we are willing to take with a pinch of salt or more 😊

Media today follows a simple formula, find out what is the conflict, find the first information, sensationalise it, post, repost/retweet, counter, troll keep feeding this conflict. BE THE FIRST or ONE OF THE FIRST TO HAVE AN OPINION, reinforce the narrative. Follow the numbers, the views and the comments to figure out the next sensationalised content. We are radicalised at an exponential speed by news on social media !

The Hyper partisan media has taken us way off centre from reality. The moment we hear hyper partisan, our thoughts jump to the new age media, podcasters and Youtube. Traditional media companies have become deeply polarised in their ideologies too. The old adage ‘Agree to Disagree’ is taken so far that they don’t even agree on basic facts.

Is it possible for people to disregard facts knowingly? Apparently Yes! That’s where the problem starts.

The new world that is borderless and hyper connected with technology unfortunately has more clubs that ever before. Clubs of the Silicon Valley, Clubs of the ruling party, Clubs of the liberals, Clubs of the everything that are super accelerated by technology. There was a time when clubs had restrictions, only a selected few could get in and the views were made face to face so you would be extra cautious about making them. Today, online clubs abound with fake bonhomie, flaunting belongingness, trumpeting views from behind screens (jeez, I am doing that too!!) Its has made our reaction time negligible, we just want to be the first to post and show our solidarity to the club we belong to. People now confuse dissent with disloyalty. We further the narrative of the club we belong to and just don’t care if it is true. And that is how fake news is created, The Curated Fake Reality!

Ironically, in the first part of this blog I picked up points from one of the top media companies in the world. A media company that different people label differently based on their point of view - Left, Alt Left, Liberal, Alt Liberal, but for me, they are another hyper partisan media promoting their agenda using the same monologues that was once the mainstay of right-wing media. What does that say about the media? Wrong question, what does that say about us, it is us who are having a dopamine kick out of viral sensational anchoring and news, it is we who have been radicalised and media is just feeding you what you want to consume!!

Crypto currency or this cryptic viral news that will destabilise nations first is an easy guess. It’s the latter!!

Before we run to find a solution it’s always important to address the right problem. What then is the right problem here? Everyone knows: The Money Angle!

In India, over the past few days there has been a big furore in media about the valuation of a start-up IPO. The share prices tanked more than 30% of the listing price in the first 2 days and continues to do so! Most alternative media organisations are also like start-ups funded by investors looking to increase the valuation of their investments. In the last 4 years, mainstream media including the top 3 across India and United states constantly trumpeting TRP rating on how they have overtaken the competition. We see millions being routed to alternate media both right and left to create sensational content. Please remember extreme left is also an issue. It is not only the right conservative extremism that’s dangerous. Do I already look left aligned? I get that a lot especially when I talk about the money angle, the words get even more colourful: Commie!!

But the agenda is simple - bring more advertisers, more investors by creating sensational polarised click baits to trigger viewer’s dopamine & get them glued into the TV…oops it is the mobile now which can detect how many minutes you spend on that channel. (Talk about how useful tech is!) It is the millions that are being pumped that create the problem.

Ask a lay person to pause and answer this question - Has technology made information better? The answer by a rational human will be, it has made it quicker, not better!

With the problem identified, do we really have a solution?

Money angle is the problem, not money itself. The concept of money is that it has to be invested and needs to grow. But some allocation of money across the world has to be done for Common Good and Common Sense for the world to remain sane.

I remember back in the day, we had Doordarshan in India. A sense of discipline existed about news. No breaking news, no sensationalism, they were news bearers and not radicalisation agents! It was a government media agency. Can it be potentially biased too? Yes! of course. A la China, where reporting is so state controlled.

The solution definitely is not a state - controlled media.

The solution may well lie in the hands of tech entrepreneurs who have created disruptive solutions in various sectors and their pitch decks start with “What global problem are we solving?”!

Yep! The Elon Musks of the world can fix the problem. How? Create a social enterprise out of Media. Make the entire funding accountable for people and any auditors to view, just like he asked UN to suggest a plan on how they could solve world hunger if he gave them 6 billion dollars. Obviously, all of us including business leaders have our leaning towards right or left. We are humans, but in the collective good we have got to agree that NEWS needs to kept Neutral.

A media house not funded by P.E, Investors or government stooges, but rather a social enterprise crowd funded by tech & business leaders and people of the world. It has to be about reporting and most importantly it has to be about giving EQUAL TIME TO ALL VIEWPOINTS! A media ecosystem that doesn’t show numbers, views, followers, will stop VIRALITY and just focuses on factual representation! A source of information and not viral dopamine kicks. Sounds Utopian? 😊Well Utopia is that oasis that we seek when we are walking through a desert, you have to believe in its possibility and not be disheartened that it could be a mirage.

We cannot stop the metaverses of the world where now we will experience a breaking news inside a digital environment. Imagine how much more radicalisation will happen, far worse than the 2D radicalisation we are exposed to now. But the same goes for factual news, we will feel better too. So that cannot be stopped, but DISRUPTED, definitely yes!

Every new tech that comes along, talks about more accountability and creating more reality in its experience. Similarly, the polarisation created by the agenda based or stock market- based funding that media receives to fuel its sensational growth will be replaced probably by the same technology that Crypto driven environment which if you believe will decentralise money. It will decentralise information, but with a more socially determined framework which should focus on the Dualism of information given and diverse views being heard!

Let us replace the Verbal Duels that we hear these days on media with some old- fashioned quality Verbal Duals.

Dual Views on the piece are welcome 😉