Social Media Analysis 3 – Greater accessibility brings greater responsibility

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
We are continuing our discussion on social We are continuing our discussion on social media social media and today I will speak on the topic of accessibility and responsibility today we see in the world there is a lot of emphasis on freedom that the freedom to choose freedom the word freedom has tremendous appeal people want to have freedom freedom to choose their jobs choose their, which is fine enough freedom to choose their government to choose their life partners freedom even sometimes it goes beyond, people want to in advance choose the gender of their children nowadays with with with gender roles becoming less stratified, sometimes people even want to, they feel that they belong to some other gender and they want to surgically change their gender, so the idea is ours is a very freedom driven culture and whenever anything is, whenever the suffix of freedom is attached to something then lot of emotional support comes up to that cause and that way if we consider social media it seems to offer us a lot of freedom the freedom to communicate with anybody in any part of the world somebody might be cloistered in a room but they can have contacts with anybody in any part of the world so it seems to be, it seems to promise a lot of freedom so the whole world seems to be accessible to us and we are also conversely accessible to other people and the Bhagavatam while describing the the characteristics of Kalyuga, it is said that this is a post truth culture a post truth culture sorry, satyatve dharshtyam evahi, that’s what the Bhagavatam says satyatve satyatve means truthfulness that is concerned to be who is considered truthful? anyone who has the idea that they can speak very audaciously satyatve dharshtyam evahi whoever can become most audacious, who can speak most audaciously dharshtya is audacity that person is considered truthful and it’s interesting that the last year 2016-17 language is always in a state of flux some words go out of fashion, like nowadays when we speak nobody says di, dao, dai but that was the standard English say 200-300 years ago so just as some words become old fashioned similarly some words come in new and then these new words are called neologisms and Cambridge Dictionary for the last year they said the neologism that described last year the most that was used the most in the mainstream media and other places was called post-truth post-truth means that we have come to a level where truth doesn’t matter just like there is modern and post-modern so the mainstream ethos of the western world is now called as post-modern ethos that means we have gone beyond the modern times where people had a lot of faith in science and now we have gone to a post-modern phase where people are primarily concerned not so much with science as with other things such as they are concerned with personal experience so science of course is an important authority but the kind of captivation, mesmerisation that people had with science that bubble which was there in the start of the 20th century that is not there now so much especially with the second world war when weapons of mass destruction were used after that technology is not seen as a as a as an absolute blessing we all use technology no doubt but still there is some amount of suspicion some amount of caution with this use of technology so we just say there is a post-modern age where people are concerned not with science or with scripture as source of authority they are concerned only with their own experience as a source of authority similarly there is post-truth post-truth means that what is the truth doesn’t matter whatever is propagated the most that is considered to be the truth so this is actually a correlation with that according to our own whoever is the most audacious that person is considered the most truthful and in this the essential result that happens of such a way of looking at life is that in today’s world whoever makes the largest noise so that person gets noticed and that person is eventually considered truthful so for example I recently saw an advertisement which basically said that growth is a function of visibility and this succinctly summarises the ethos in today’s world growth is a function of visibility normally we would say visibility is a function of growth a baby who is very small may not be seen but if that baby has grown into a giant human being then that person can be very easily seen so the more a person has grown the more they will be visible and whether they are visible or not by nature’s own order they will grow but in today’s world growth is a function of visibility that means if any brand has to grow, any company has to grow any idea has to grow then it has to be more and more visible in people’s eyes and this visibility is what is made much more easier in one sense through technology and primarily through social media so when the visibility becomes the basis for growth the more product is marketed the more it is promoted, the more it becomes visible and the more people purchase it the more people notice it, the more people talk about it the more people purchase it and then that’s how the company which is marketing that grows so growth is considered to be a function of visibility, that means if you want to grow, first you have to become visible so this results in something very striking that is that even if something is not very important, if it is simply made very visible then people get caught with it then people get obsessed with it people just lose their perspective so a good example of this is advertising now in advertising the whole idea is that there has to be with the industrialisation mass production of goods the result was that actually there was so much production that happened that technology made production relatively easier and then the main challenge was not production of goods but it was distribution of goods because so much was produced at one place through mass production using technology and for that kind of distribution, visibility became very important, marketing became very important promotion became very important now this is so widespread that even in fields like say medicines many pharmaceutical companies, now we would say medicine is a necessity and yes when we are sick, it is a necessity but still actually there are many pharmaceutical companies whose promotion budget far exceeds their production budget even for a company that is producing medicines, they have to advertise and they have to advertise not just to customers, they also have to advertise to the doctors because the doctors otherwise how or why will they recommend the particular product so because of this the result is that there is a lot of confusion that happens in terms of what is the reality what is the reality means that is something which is promoted in a particular way, is that for real or is it simply hype created by a particular source for promoting itself and now with social media at least with advertisement it was generic you know we all, if we watch the same television, we all watch the same sports matches, same movies and there in we see similar advertisements but with customisation being done as per user preferences, user choices user history both by google ads as well as in social media we have a particular circle of people around us and those people who are in our circle, they have certain interests, certain likes and then they share some links with us and then basically when something becomes shared by people to us, we share it to others if we find it interesting and then it can become viral and whether in this process something is true or not that consideration goes into the background the frenzy is created about a particular issue by just, something just sounds very sensational and generally when people want to share something, people all of us have a tendency to seek attention and for example, if we enter into a room it sometimes titillates our ego to see how many people turn their heads and hear me when I am speaking that’s giving attention similarly, today people seek attention in social media, when they want to share something and after sharing it how many people actually pay attention, how many people look at them, how many people turn towards them how many people take things ahead so that is something which is not very often thought about easily thought about means when something is attention worthy, just like in day to day conversation also when somebody starts gossiping something that in today’s media, in today’s high tech technology which can spread news very fast it is said that say people dress informally at their home and if they are going to go out somewhere, they dress formally and then they go out of the house so it is said that a gossip a lie can go half way around the world before truth has even put on its clothes to go out that means that sometimes somebody spreads some idea about something and if it sounds very sensational, it sounds like a juicy tidbit of gossip then people just get consumed by it, say yes this is sensational, I want to hear this and think of it that way when they get consumed by it, then the result of that consumption that emotional occupation, preoccupation by it is that they just don’t evaluate whether it is true or not because they think if I share it, so many people will share it further, so many people will like it, so many people will comment on it and basically it gives a media by which we can catch attention of others and this tendency to catch attention can actually be very counterproductive because in the frenzy to catch attention the truth the truthfulness of something is not considered very seriously it’s newsworthiness it’s not trustiness or truthiness you could say, newsworthiness means does it make news but is it the word truthiness means is it true or does it just sound like truth so based on that certain ideas get circulated and when they are circulated it’s just over sometimes people their reputations can get damaged for somebody who is in honour, dishonour can be worse than death so people’s reputations can be ruined in moments if certain ideas about them are spread and even if they are true or not true, it just spreads and it’s not just a matter of reputations it’s also a matter of perceptions perceptions so whoever is expert in manipulating the social media they often shape people’s opinions people’s conceptions of what is right, what is wrong what is true, what is not true all these are shaped by what we hear, what we read and there is a tunnel vision into which we get caught.
Tunnel vision is a phrase which is used to demonstrate which is used to refer to a very narrow conception of reality that means say if we are in a tunnel then all that we can see is what is ahead of us that also if there is some light in the tunnel we can see but apart from that if we look up we just see the wall and we see dark if there is no light only at the end of the tunnel then all that we can see is ahead otherwise we can’t see much also but even if we could see we can’t move forward. So tunnel vision refers to a very narrow vision of reality whereas reality is very complex but we see it in a very very narrow perspective. So often in the age of social media where people get the opportunity to have everyone else accessible and then they speak so the result is that there is greater there is a greater control by the urge to gossip because we feel that I speak something it will catch so much attention and I can share it here I can share it here I can share it here and people just get consumed by this obsession to gossip and with the accessibility of the whole world then one gossip by one person can spread so far away even if it has no substance in it.
So there is a post post truth means that people don’t consider the truth so much what they consider is whether it is newsworthy whether it is going to make a splash whether it is going to create a sensation and people think of their credibility in terms of how much are their ideas vetted by others how much are their ideas shared by others liked by others now at one level it may say that actually there is the whole idea that there is a media is controlled by certain people with certain interests and there are they don’t allow anything apart from the particular angle the particular story that they want to tell the world and that’s how things stay restricted but in this case there is the alternative world also can come through because people have access to social media and yes that is true so it is possible and it works out constructively also so for example much of the mainstream media is in India it is quite anti Hindu anti Vedic culture and often whatever is critical is talked about whatever is positive is not talked about so much and the rest also much of the media is anti India India is portrayed as a land where say women are there is violence against women it is portrayed as a land where there is a discriminatory caste system there is it is portrayed of a negative way now that negativity may be a reality also but it is a part of the reality it is not the whole reality so but if a particular kind of reality is portrayed again and again and again then that becomes the mainstream conception and this conception is important especially because there are people who are hearing this and this is all that they are hearing so when this is when this becomes the basis on which people’s opinions are formed then at a subtle level things can become very deleterious things can become very negative things can become destructive also and the way to overcome this is is actually the social and social the mainstream media is being used to portray misconceptions then a counter has to be done through the alternatives that means say social media can be used to tell the other side of the story and when the other side of the story is told people oh I didn’t know it was like this also this is also there this is also there so yes it is possible that if the mainstream narrative is dominated by a particular conception then an alternative narrative can be given and the alternative narrative may be more truthful also now it is ideology that often shapes shapes the use of technology there is an author E F Shoemaker who wrote a book called quite a celebrated author who wrote a book called Guide for the Perplexed and he describes his tour to Russia when at that time it was USSR and when he was there in the USSR at that time he was going on a trip of Moscow and there was a guide who was there with him who was guiding him and he was looking at a map also of Moscow and he saw that actually there is he got a little confused and he could see in front of him a big church but it was not there on the map he said what is going on no the guide said he said custodially that actually we don’t show churches on our maps we don’t show churches on our map because for the communist government which is officially not just atheistic but aggressively atheistic anti-theistic they wanted to remove religion from the map of the world and they wanted to remove religion from the minds of people also Karl Marx considered religion to be the opium of the masses so now because of this we see cartography making maps it’s a technology but now when technology is appropriated by some ideology the ideology is we want to remove religion from the world and for removing religion from the world what do you do use cartography draw maps but then as per the ideology remove all religions from the map so now then he went Schumacher says that he went forward and he saw there was another church over there and he said that was there in the map he says but this is here he said no but that was a church now it is it is no longer a church it is used by the USSR government as administrative building and that’s why we kept it on the map so it’s not as a church so basically that means there is reality and there is depiction of reality so now what will be depicted on the reality will depend not only on the technology but it can also depend on the mentality of the people who are controlling the technology so there may be 100 churches in Moscow but in the map of Moscow we will not see a single church that’s how the ideology is shaping the way the technology works similarly in social media the result is that when a particular idea becomes mainstream when a particular idea gets propagated say those who are in charge of the technology they want to promote a particular thing, particular way of looking at things, particular world view then that is what gets promoted and everything else gets even if it is there it is not promoted, it is not depicted so social media the result of this post-truth age means that certain aspects of reality are what are highlighted, they are talked about and other aspects are completely left out so this you may say that no, anybody can share anything on say Facebook, anybody can share anything on social media and that is true yes we can, in that sense we could say there is universalisation of accessibility for expression when people operate somewhere then they won’t be, just have to silently endure it because they have an opportunity to they have an opportunity to speak to express themselves, that is true but it’s not what is what is spoken on social media it is what becomes viral on social media what is propagated on social media that matters and what is going to get propagated we can’t say, we don’t know, what is going to get propagated depends on a multitude of factors and the most important factor is that, now what is more gossipy what is more juicy so all this is not to say that there is no truth but rather it increases the responsibility of the user the responsibility of the transmitter to transmit the truth and more important the responsibility of the user to choose the truth so when we say responsibility what do we exactly mean by this every time when we have freedom freedom brings with it the capacity for choosing but along with the capacity for choosing comes the responsibility of the consequence of the choice so that means say if we have an exam and we have been given a prescribed text book and the teacher has taught that I am giving these notes to you so then there is a text book and there are the notes and we read that and based on that we prepare for the class but suppose to the contrary we have something like instead of the notebook instead of having one text book we have a series of books and then whichever book we want to choose we decide which books to read and we prepare for the subject and now what will come in the exam we are not given like a standard book we are just given a series of reference books so then it will become more difficult how do I prepare for the exam or let’s take it further say students are told that there is no structured course when you go to college you choose whichever courses you want to do you do these credits now it seems at one level very flexible very good that the student can study this subject, that subject, that subject but then at the end when they complete their graduation are they going to have a good enough degree with good enough knowledge of subjects by which they can get a job so students have chosen particular subjects for their credit and eventually they find that that’s not what gives them a job then that becomes a problem so there is a freedom of choice but there is a responsibility of consequence that comes or to give a more extreme example nowadays because there is doctors also have a lot of fear of litigation against them that the customers may sue us the patients may sue us so suppose a patient goes to a doctor and the doctor instead of prescribing a medicine take this medicine morning, afternoon, evening, take it for 3 days you will be cured, instead of that the doctor starts saying assume you have these symptoms, these 5 symptoms we can see and these 5 symptoms indicate that it could be any of these 5 diseases 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and if this if this is a disease we can choose any of these 3 treatments this treatment will have this consequence, this treatment will have this long, this will be the expense of this treatment and like that the doctor presents 15 options to the patient this could be this, you could have any of these 5 diseases and you could have any of these 3 treatments for these 5 diseases, so now among these 15 options which do you want to choose and the patient will say how can I choose and the patient cannot decide what my disease is, it is the doctor to decide what the disease is certainly if there are certain complications involved in certain medicine, certain major expenses involved and the doctor has to inform the patient that is a duty, but the owners of diagnosing and treating that is cannot be shifted from the patient from the doctor to the patient, if that happens the patient says I will choose what treatment I want and the result of that is that the patient actually becomes burden if the patient chooses the wrong treatment and or then the patient will have to suffer the consequences of the disease going on and on so the flip side of freedom is responsibility, more the freedom the greater the responsibility and applying the same thing to social media there is a greater accessibility that means we can access more people and more people can access us when this accessibility is increased along with the accessibility comes the responsibility so those transmitting this information they have to be responsible what am I sharing, am I sure this is true or not and those who are receiving they also have to become more responsible otherwise we might just receive certain things from certain sources and they may not be reliable at all but because it has been shared repeatedly because it has been viewed so many times so we think maybe this is true so especially with respect to scriptural knowledge scriptural knowledge is timeless we don’t need anything yes we can be aware of contemporary presentations of timeless spiritual knowledge but the important thing is that scripture does talk about truth truth is not determined by the test of popularity truth is not determined by the test of humour or laughter sometimes some speakers when they speak they make a lot of jokes and people flock to their classes in hundreds and thousands now yes if people are coming to hear about Krishna in large number that’s very good but if people are primary interest is in hearing the jokes and after hearing the jokes when they go back there may be some other philosophy also spoken but what they remember is the joke then basically they are judging spiritual knowledge by the laughter test now whichever episode of spiritual knowledge I’m using the word episode because for people it’s like entertainment it’s entertainment so because it’s entertainment so essentially the result is that the entertainment means that people get caught completely and their mood is to be entertainment and whichever episode like we have serials with episodes so whichever episode has more and more of the delivery of a particular subject more entertaining content that’s what gets circulated that’s what gets popularity so spiritual knowledge is not determined by the popularity test, it’s not determined by the humour test, it is determined by what is actually true so the ethos of determining the value of something by its popularity which becomes very prominent on facebook it may actually decrease our capacity to discern between what is true and what is not true and then the result of that will be that people get consumed by illusion so for us accessibility may be more but responsibility also becomes more and when responsibility is more that means we have to choose more carefully and that’s why again our basic spiritual consciousness is extremely important the more our consciousness is spiritual the more we can actually recognise we will have our sattva guni intelligence at least to be able to discern carefully this makes sense, this doesn’t make sense, this is important, this is not important, this is how it is, this is not how it is Krishna says in 14.11 in the Bhagavad Gita that all the doors to the body, the doors refer to the senses means means illumination so Krishna says that in the mode of goodness that when the mode of goodness becomes prominent and all the doors of the senses doors of the body become illumined by knowledge what this means is not that a person would goodness, look at them some light comes from their ears or light comes from their nose or their eyes, not like that if we consider a door, if a door is if the area of the door is dark, we won’t know who is coming in, whether a friend is coming in or an enemy is coming in, we won’t know but if the area of the door is lit properly then we can see, oh this is a friend coming this is an enemy coming and then we can choose appropriately should I let this person come or should I not let this person come, sattva guna basically leads to the illumination of our pathways of our senses which are the pathways by which we acquire knowledge so then when the senses are illumined this way then we can decide which information from the outer world to let in and which information to not let out and also we can determine how I should respond, how I should not respond so this illumination happens when we are in the mode of goodness, if we are too much in the mode of passion or ignorance then this illumination is not there, when this illumination is not there then we just can’t do anything properly, that’s why for us as sadhakas it’s so important to have our spiritual knowledge, well rooted in spiritual knowledge so that we are at least in the mode of goodness and being in the mode of goodness we can choose properly, so there is the excitement often because there is so much accessibility there but along with accessibility comes responsibility and the more we are responsible in making proper choices, the more we can move forward and the more we become irresponsible or maybe lose our sense of responsibility then accessibility can become the gateway to illusion because at least all that happens is more and more we become, more and more misconceptions become accessible to us, more and more illusions become accessible to us and thus we go down the drain of deeper and darker illusions but by recognising that accessibility brings the responsibility and we tune our intelligence we prepare ourselves to be more discerning in making healthy choices then that very accessibility can enable us to ourselves stay rooted in truth and to share truth with many other people so in a post truth age where people don’t recognise the value of truth it is important for us to remember the value of truth and based on the and this recognition comes when we are situated in the mode of goodness and then we can use the accessibility for providing more visibility to the truth to Krishna’s message and as I said visibility, growth is a function of visibility this increased visibility for Krishna’s message can also lead to attracting more and more people but that will happen when there is there is proper responsibility, proper maturity when we are in the mode of goodness and that’s why the freedom is not just the ability to choose what we desire freedom comes by the capacity or the maturity to choose wisely not just to have options but to also have the discrimination by which to make proper choices among those options and that’s why spiritual knowledge is foundational because it gives us the capacity to discern among the various options and then choose the options in a way that works for us and not against us so I will summarise I spoke about social media in a post truth world so post truth is a word it has used recently it was declared by the Cambridge dictionary as the word of last year more or less because in so many in the US elections the Brexit before that and so many other times the idea was that decisions were made based on whatever people heard on social media and people did not really concern themselves so much with what the truth was as what was perceived as the truth, what was propagated as the feeling of truth so just as some words go out of fashion some words come into creation and they become popular also and those words also reflect the mentality of people so with respect to spiritual knowledge, with respect to social media there is enormous amount of accessibility that has been given, granted to us but this accessibility leads to erosion of critical faculty where people evaluate what is truth or not and this erosion of the critical faculty is predicted in the Bhagavatam when it says that whoever is the most audacious will be considered truthful and therefore to counter this, to overcome this what we need I gave examples of how gossip especially can, gossip can go half way around the world before truth has dressed itself to come out of the house so like that what happens is that people just get carried away just as everybody wants to have attention in life and social media gives us a way to have attention how many people watch what we have posted and read or share or comment or like whatever I have done whatever I have posted and then people often post based on whatever sounds sensational whatever sounds attention catching, whatever sounds newsworthy instead of focussing on that which is actually truthful, people don’t evaluate what is truthful, they simply whatever is propagated that is considered to be truthful because so many people are seeing it, so many people are sharing it it must be true, so growth is a function of visibility that is the maxim of today’s age and just as I said that the USSR ideology was to use cartography to propagate their ideology they depicted maps with no churches on them that was intentional so like that, technology and social media they may propagate a particular we used to propagate a particular ideology and certain other facts which may be true in reality, they will just not appear on the map or the conceptual framework that we acquire through social media, we get a tunnel vision where our whole thoughts and vision is directed in a particular way and alternative perspectives we don’t come to know of course, if the this is not necessarily always a bad thing because the mainstream media is giving a biassed perspective, then social media can give the alternative perspective which may be more truthful but the problem is that whatever gets propagated, that is what is considered truthful, so people often don’t have a very critical strong critical reasoning faculty to evaluate the truth so just as with the freedom to access information from anywhere in the world, the freedom to communicate with anyone in the world that freedom brings responsibility of the consequence of that freedom just like if we choose which if the doctor pushes the responsibility on to us, which treatment are you going to take among these 15 options based on the 5 possible diagnoses of disease then the patient will get crushed, crushed under that responsibility patient is not equipped so like that, we when we have so much information thrown at us and we don’t have the we may just feel overwhelmed and we just select some course of action based on some criteria and we adopt a particular world view which may not be the correlating with reality and this is not to demonise social media but to recognise that our responsibility increases with how much accessibility we have so in the mode of goodness the doors of the senses are illumined that means we know what to take in and what to how to evaluate it so we need to have strong spiritual practises, situate ourselves in spiritual knowledge then the increased accessibility we will be able to use it properly, we will have the maturity to use the accessibility properly and then Krishnadasa also we can propagate as visibility determines growth so the more we make Krishnadasa visible the more it will also attract people and will grow but for all that we need to recognise that technology is always is often a tool for people with their own ideologies and we need to be careful that we don’t get carried away just by people speaking audaciously but we focus on having our discerning faculty strong by which we can evaluate what is the truth and then benefit from the truth and share that with others thank you are there any questions or comments