Chinese Whispers is a game we have all played as children. A group of children sit in a circle and one child whispers a line into another's ears. "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." By the time the message reached the last child, it becomes a twisted, unrecognisable version of its original form. "The slick gown hoax humps ogre the crazy god."
The Internet in general and distributors of information on the Internet are also prey to a Chinese Whispers-like situation. As events unfold, narratives get twisted, shaped according to individual biases and opinions. Our dissatisfaction with the narrative leads us to add our own interpretation to a story. Responses to events are in turn affected by this change in storytelling and this ends up as a cycle that can never be broken. Or in some other cases, two points of view constantly battle with each other with no end in sight.
Take, for instance, the Peshawar attack. Two dominant narratives exist now. One is that religion is the reason for all the ills in the world. Another is that the misinterpretation of religion is the reason for everything evil. Neither of these are completely correct, nor are they unbiased facts. They are, therefore attempts to gain an understanding of why such horrors occur, at almost regular intervals.
Dominant narratives can also take ugly and often uncomfortable turns. An unambiguous moral code also helps us ignore atrocities in the northeastern part of the country, especially when it is something that we find difficult to slot under good or bad. Killing children is most definitely bad, but killing a man who looks suspicious doesn’t hurt our sensibilities so much.
When a terror attack occurs now, more often than not, Islam is usually the first religion to be blamed. Not only does this ignore history — where non-religious ideologies have been responsible for just as many deaths, or other religions whose zealots took into their own hands to rid the earth of people they couldn’t care less about — it is also an example of how dominant narratives can change stories.
As the Sydney hostage crisis happened, a good number of people, having decided that religion was the only cause behind a lone gunman's attack, decided to denounce said religion itself, instead of looking at systemic issues which led to a lack of security and awareness within the country.
With Peshawar, the ugliness returned. So much that some were rejoicing that Pakistan got a taste of its own medicine. Others were calling for war against the TTP, completely ignoring the fact that it is an internal affair for Pakistan. Closet bigotry was exposed and hatemongers came out of the woodwork. Behavioural patterns changed from being slightly judgmental to outright attack.
Another twist to the story was offered by the eternally self-centred. That this attack made them feel awful, "Why did I have to see this?". It is easy for us to behave in a reactive and selfish manner. It doesn't take too much effort for us to do so. The other end of the spectrum results in meaningless platitudes, like the hashtag #IndiaWithPakistan. Solidarity, or slacktivism, serves very little real purpose, except for creating an opportunity for people to blend in, to become a part of something they otherwise wouldn’t be if not for the existence of social media. To an extent this too can be clubbed with the self-centred take on an event.
Earlier, narratives were controlled by news makers and news breakers. This doesn’t mean one can ignore discussion and debate centred around an event at the time, but social media, and other aggregators of information which feed social media have made discussions happen on a much larger scale than before. When the Watergate scandal broke, before it did, the information wasn’t publicly accessible until The Washington Post got its hands on it, that too, only after William Felt decided to part with the information.
If this had happened in the last decade, before a major newspaper obtained information, a leak would have been staged, emails read by millions, and shared by more, judgments made and debated. By no means can it be decided that things were better in the old days. The way we access information has changed, but what we do with said information hasn’t by much.
To hijack an existing narrative to involve ourselves in it is something we have been doing for a long time, and will continue doing so as long as access is unrestricted. But the medium we use to do it now makes it seem worse.
