Messaging apps like WhatsApp have shown an uptick.
As I compulsively opened my Twitter page this morning, I woke up to a report by Oxford University-Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism’s Digital News Report for 2018 that told me that as consumers look for more privacy, they are leaving open apps such as Facebook and opting for more closed ones. For the first time since the phenomenon began more than a decade ago among users in the 37 countries across continents that the report included (alas, it does not include India), social media use for news consumption has shown a decline. The Reuters report says that messaging apps such as WhatsApp, on the other hand, have shown an uptick.
ACTIVE NEWS CONSUMPTION: If I were mainstream media or a social media marketer or generally anyone else, this is one report that I wouldn’t ignore. As Nieman Reports’ Laura Hazard Owen, who wrote an analysis of the Reuters report, says, and as it is now widely acknowledged, social media has become the major source of news consumption. But even those among us who are gung-ho and technologically optimistic and were initially jubilant, have more recently felt spooked like never before by the extent to which social media has impacted us. Today, social media suddenly seems like a hydra-like spectre armed with unregulated human behaviour, and is its own nemesis. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, in his company’s Q4 result report last year, ominously stated: “News and video will always be an important part of Facebook. But when people are spending so much time passively consuming public content that it starts taking away from the time people are connecting with each other, that’s not good. Let me be clear. Helping people connect is more important than maximising the time they spend on Facebook.” Of course, as passive as all this social media news consumption may claim to be, it isn’t that innocent, is it?
WHATSAPP GROWTH AS RESULT OF DISTRUST: All this is no surprise for the Indian observer. Worldwide, WhatsApp use has tripled since 2014 to well over 1.5 billion, and the Indian market has been at the forefront of that shiny path, not without remarkable consequences. In 2014, there were 50 million active monthly users of this messaging app in India; in February 2018, there were 200 million. As the WhatsApp phenomenon matures, its misuse has cost lives, relationships and trust. The decay of trust began with the distrust of mainstream media, and as fake news snakes its way into our lives, this rot is likely to culminate in people’s mistrust of each other.
Yet, as India is showing, the very definition of news that assumes a “credible” source seems to be in jeopardy. A journalist friend recently reminded me that “credibility is relative and subjective”. There have been 21 WhatsApp message-triggered lynching over the past two months, and of the most barbaric variety. While the jury (i.e., the set of primetime “experts”) is out on whether the lynch mobs are themselves organised or politicised, these mob killings have happened sometimes in the presence of the police, sometimes have been hailed by the right-wing political party, but have always been accompanied by video evidence. They have also happened across the country, in less literate states like Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh as well as in more progressive ones like Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu—agnostic to education levels and prosperity. To me, this is emerging evidence of the mirror crack’d, because credibility was supposed to be at the core of news sources not only for journalists themselves but for their consumers too.
BELIEF RUSH: Societies are stitched with hierarchies of information, and our mainstream media have for too long assumed an institutional role in being the provider of information. But it seems that with the emergence of social media and the flattening of knowledge hierarchies, this knowledge gap has merely taken on a new linkage. Scholars like to call this a “belief gap”, but actually, I see it as a rush of belief. All the filter bubbles and echo chambers that the social media has exposed (as opposed to “created”) are factorials of belief. It is as though we are all wired with certain amounts of belief, and when we lose our belief in one source of enlightenment or object of sharing, we instinctively replace it with another.
As the report suggests, the ways in which social media consumers are lapping up news is changing. But why are people, including Indian users, moving away from an open platform like Facebook when it comes to gathering news? The decline in electronic media’s credibility has meant that we’d rather believe our friendly neighbourhood WhatsApp group-mate. Perhaps this reflects the Indian version of the worldwide decline in trust in our institutions, although trends show that this decline is far less in India than in western countries.
SHOWCASE OF IMAGES: Social media has brought another major shift in mass psyche. Remember the fuss around Danny Boyle’s 2008 film, Slumdog Millionaire? While a large section of our population welcomed it, sections also protested its portrayal of India (by the white man, of course) in rather poor light. The typical Indian is a proud Indian—the kind who shows nationalistic fervour and is constantly conscious, often defensive, of India’s image. But the dichotomy of open social media now stands exposed to the proud Indian. As more and more of India’s underbelly is exposed by smartphones belonging to active citizens and activist groups, open social media such as Facebook has undermined the images and the preferred truths we want to create around a glitzy India. The grand ugliness of our underbelly should remain limited to closed, trusted circles, it would appear.
So the Reuters report seems timed to perfection in the Indian context, showing us the mirror of the human unease associated with fakeness and distrust. Social media is finally showing that it, too, has a life cycle. After a decade of growth—the most unregulated and unfettered among modern technological growths—things seem to be cooling off, one of the most credible reports on journalism tells us. So is there hope for social media? Or has it, like racism, casteism and Donald Trump, shamed us humans too deeply to re-emerge?
This trend should serve as an opportunity for mainstream television and its digital version in India to address the widening trust deficit with its consumer. The fourth pillar of democracy can re-strengthen only when it counters, not collaborates with, the social media’s biggest fallibility—its shaky ways of gathering information.
Shashidhar Nanjundaiah has led renowned media institutes in India, as the Director of Symbiosis Institute of Media & Communication, founding Director of Indira School of Communication, and first Dean of India Today Media Institute. He pioneered research on the political economy of a newly liberalised Indian media marketplace, and currently observes how India’s news television industry is shaping itself in this decade. He has also edited newspapers and magazines in India and the US.