Digital fault lines, real consequences explored in Graham's 'Adolescence'

Stephen Graham’s Adolescence on Netflix is a gripping watch. Its four episodes are like frames set in worlds that are totally different — and yet they complete the picture. The first looks at the arrest of Jamie Miller, a 13-year-old murder suspect in the UK. The second takes you to his school where the girl he is accused of murdering turns out to be one of his online tormentors. The third tackles Jamie’s psychological evaluation. The last one captures what having a kid in jail has done to the family. The show doesn’t cast anyone as the bad guy. It just takes you through a set of circumstances created by social media influences and what it has done to a normal family. The parents’ guileless guilt, their belief that their child was safe in his room with his computer hits you in the gut. Not surprisingly, the show has been trending globally. Adolescence is also an analogy for our world today — full of ideological, religious, economic, sociological or geographical ghettos — with no one ghetto seemingly connected to another.

 

In the past, there were always books, films, a sport, or an event that gave us a sense of a common experience. In the ’80s and ’90s, it was Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984, followed seven years later by that of her son, Rajiv Gandhi. In 1997, Princess Diana’s fatal accident stands out in memory. There was the sheer ebullience of a liberalising country, a sense that we were building India together.

 

There were a handful of mainstream newspapers, Doordarshan was in its high-quality phase, and satellite TV had just taken its first steps. Films were losing ground but still held popular imagination. And news channels were just that — bearers of facts about what had happened, and where. The outrage and anger were left to us, as audiences and citizens. The first mall, the first multiplex were delights my generation discovered together. We laughed, cried, and sighed over Shah Rukh Khan’s dimples, Manmohan Singh’s poetry, and Sushma Swaraj’s brilliant repartee in Parliament.

 

You could argue that I am romanticising that era. Maybe. But even if we didn’t like certain points of view, we saw them in a larger context because of the sheer serendipity of news consumption that very few common newspapers or TV channels forced on us. That serendipity doesn’t exist now.

 

Many years ago, in 2015, Tim Luckhurst, then a professor and historian of journalism, at the University of Kent, told me:  “Democracy functions when there is collective action and therefore we need to have a collective news consumption, on some things at least.” If you have watched the interplay between human beings and technology since the rise of the internet (1995) and social media (from 2004), Professor Luckhurst’s words hit home. India now has over 900 channels, thousands of newspapers, over 860 radio channels,  60 video streaming apps, and a dozen music ones. There is an overwhelming amount of content and media choices. Yet we rarely have common experiences. And when we do, like with the pandemic, our versions of what we experienced are completely different.

 

Barack Obama once said that debate has become difficult because, “we can’t seem to agree on facts.” Is the Indian economy in the doldrums or is it booming? It is almost impossible for regular people to ascertain this. Newspapers rarely publish any decent analysis. News channels seem impossible to watch, though over 100 million Indians do watch them. About 524 million of us on Instagram, YouTube and WhatsApp consider ourselves well-informed. Each one of us believes in a version of reality, usually pushed by an algorithm trained by our habits. For instance, if you have been watching Dhruv Rathee and Ravish Kumar’s videos, you will see only liberal voices on your feed. There will, arguably, be nothing from the centre or right, or elsewhere unless you seek it out. For the over 524 million Indians online, this ghettoisation within their own echo-chambers is now complete. 

 

Not surprisingly, it is easy to polarise us. We are all like frogs in different wells. When we hear frogs from other wells make a ruckus, we want to shut them up. We believe that the sounds coming from our well are the only ones that matter. This is true for the world. The election of Donald Trump as the president of the United States — and what he is doing to it — is a great example of fault lines that are now digitally engraved in who we follow and believe in. They are physically manifested in what we eat, who we choose to be friends with, how we vote and even what festivals we acknowledge in public.

 

To be fair, these fault lines always existed. Politicians and tech-media businesses have simply exploited and nurtured them to create profitable markets. Most of humanity is now an aggregation of deeply divided ideological clusters — each of them a profitable market. That is why the world seems more frazzly.

 

You could argue, rightly, that both the internet and social media have been a tool for democratisation. The voice that they have given to artists, talent, and the under-privileged is phenomenal. But layer it with fake news, deep fakes, and artificial intelligence gone rogue at times. Now add the fact that only a handful of firms — Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft, each with revenues ranging from $130 billion to $600 billion — control how people spend their time, what they believe in, where advertisers spend their money to reach them.

 

This faux democratisation, concentration of economic power, and the polarisation it has created raises valid questions about the “social good” that social media has done.    https://x.com/vanitakohlik