Any media student worth his salt would tell you that the two key transformations that radio and television brought about to everyday life is immediacy and enhanced reality. With modern modes of communication came the ability to reach out to a wider audience, “live and uncensored”.
Gone were the days of measured penmanship, which gave way to showmanship. Public figures who wished to make an impression must not only look and sound appealing (whatever the flavour of the decade for appealing was), they must also risk having their slightest mistakes captured and subject to scrutiny. It was not easy to be famous in the days of television.
But if that were so, harder still it would be in these days of the Internet. In a world where the user decides on the content, what the famous try to portray is subject to multiple reproductions, as it is subject to multiple interpretations. The “official” opinion matters less on the surf waves as it does on the air waves. What matters more is how the person at the receiving end understands it and reproduces those thoughts for the rest of the world to agree, renounce, ridicule or simply enjoy.
As such, it came as a surprise to read Nazry Bahrawi write about “That YouTube style of politics’” (Today, Jul 3, p2) with some rather serious misconceptions about how the “YouTube generation” assimilates with the media they consume. Jeremy Au Yong’s “Vivian’s Vision from the Internet” (Straits Times, 3 Jul, pH04) and Lynn Kan’s “Sift truth from ‘virtual shouting’, Vivian tells students” (Business Times, 3 Jul, p9) also reflect the same news story in the same vein.
For a start, the key determinant that distinguishes the Internet from traditional media is not that it prefers style over substance. It is a grievous fault to think that is the case, because it glosses over the important fact that, what generations of media owners have tried to reproduce to no avail, is today simply and beautifully accomplished with every blog entry, every mashed-up vodcast and every ranting opinion shared online.
In other words, what distinguishes the Internet from other media is that the meaning making process has become transparent. Generations of media owners have, consciously or not, tried to bend and prod the moment of production to the moment of interpretation, in the hope that they will agree somewhere.
But to see it all played out on the Internet every second is a marvelous thing. A supposedly objective news clip can be cut, modified and relaunched online in the exact way that the vodcast editor wants it to be played ,and the same repeated with different results with another.
This is the crux of the matter that today’s public figures need to grapple with. It is not that there is no truth on the Internet. Rather, it is that truth and reality are no longer that easy to define, as they are now subject to alternate truths and multiple realities.
A simple search for the word “politics” in Facebook would demonstrate this point. The top two entries are a group in support of Barack Obama’s policies, close to a million friends, and a group against Hillary Clinton’s, a little more than half a million friends.
Are these two groups pointing towards the same conclusion? Not necessarily. Do they throw up some doubts on the complete for-and-against traditions of political alliance? Most surely. Have they secured the idea that, as long as you have an opinion, you will surely find your supporters? You can bet all you Linden dollars on it.
But if public figures today still hold out that the Internet propagates half truths, then it is a matter of time before they own opinions become extinct, because opinions online are worth only the number of supporters they can get. Online communities are forgiving towards plurality, but they do not take lightly attempts to discredit the same plurality that gives each one of them their essence.
For sure, there are shouting matches going on in cyberspace. But just as there are many contests that slam away at a dogmatic opinion, there also exist a fair number that debate and rationalise on issues that gives everyone a fair say.
Perhaps it is more important for us to have the ability to discern what opinion fits us best. However, we are still the nation that pines for a liberal arts college to deliver critical thinking, instead of making it part of our regular school curriculum.
Perhaps more dangerous are those that manage to get their opinions out unchallenged, for they will never know if the online audience agree with them whole-heartedly – almost a self-delusional impossibility but absolutely believable in the days where the one-way delivery of the television message is king – or if they are silently sniggering away at what they perceive to be nonsense.
Ironically, it is in the days of the Internet, not television and radio, where our views are subject to even more stringent public scrutiny, where every word and sound bite can be recorded, reproduced, remixed and re-circulated at the fancy and opinion of the reader, not the producer.
To be part of the online public sphere today, one must come to the virtual table with a certain degree of humility. Accept that the truth is really what people make it out to be, as it has always been, but with the understanding that today, people will not hesitate to leverage technology to make their views known. N
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