Letters: Limited to signals

T C A Srinivasa-Raghavan's illuminating and refreshing argument in "The case for banning opinion polls" (November 8) comes in the wake of the shrill outcry against a ban on opinion polls by the so-called liberals and guardians of free speech. Is it not inevitable that in this digitally-driven world of limited attention span and intellectual rigour measured in characters and bytes, societal receptivity will be limited to just signals and not information or the big picture? Irrespective of whether opinion polls are banned or not, the fact of the matter is that mass media (the sponsors of such polls) does not have the time, inclination or space for poll data.

The majority is not inclined towards data since that would require diligence and hence, information intermediaries would rather offer ready-to-serve interpretations based on signals and not complete information. An empirical experiment would suffice to prove the point. Count the number of hits on the link of the research paper, provided by the author, and that on any number of online polls. One would wager that the latter hits would surpass any research paper by miles.

Ajoy K Das Kolkata

Letters can be mailed, faxed or e-mailed to:
The Editor, Business Standard
Nehru House, 4 Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg
New Delhi 110 002
Fax: (011) 23720201
E-mail: letters@bsmail.in
All letters must have a postal address and telephone number