Outside in

Premature emancipation – The Shamsul Anwar affair

By Shahbaz Ali Khan

Shahbaz, a former Industry relations and PR professional, has spent the past 8 years experimenting with the frontiers of professional competence by insisting on not specializing in anything but thinking, communicating and writing.  

Social media usage has changed people’s perception of what human experiences and contact means. Therefore, what was once dehumanized, is now part of the process of’re-humanization’. Social networks are experiencing a new kind of internal change whereby the very visible projections of a communal idea have become indiscreet, public and wholly access oriented. We have today managed to launch ourselves onto a common platform of exchange, interchangeable identities and ‘walls’ of self-exposition. This has an inherent accelerating factor for social development, social change (hopefully for the better) and the very visible impact on a community can now be felt and dissected in real-time.

In so far as Pakistanis are concerned, the new tools of social media and propagation should have, about two years ago, started us off on a path of real emancipation. On a face to face basis, people here tend to guard and flavor their expression. They follow the established thought ‘parameter’ and usually conform to accepted social truisms. In the relative anonymity of the internet (or what it was prior to the boom in new accounts on Twitter and Facebook), they are more free. They express their disgust, their vehemence and are free to provoke and protect in equal measure. There is liberation and a real and measurable breaking of the shackles, and by and large this has been a very positive thing.

When you observe a child playing with matches, you should not panic immediately, for he (she) will not set themselves and everything around them on fire right away. There is a good few minute’s delay before the child figures out how to strike alight the match-stick.

This is the unfortunate nature of our media, social or otherwise. Targeted towards a predominantly illiterate (and therefore intellectually ‘juvenile’) audience, our media never matured along with their technology. Social media is no exception. We were able to observe a very sudden and assured growth in digital access for universal expression. We were, however, not able to anticipate the flaws in its localization.

The new ‘face’ of humanization and socialization brings with it the in-built trait of impulsiveness and immediate (and uncontrolled) reaction. The Shamsul Anwar affair, turned on its head over the past few days, is an expose of how emancipation, when taken as a quick-fix shot on the arm (as opposed to a slowly ingesting pill dissolving in the stomach) can be premature, misguided and outright damaging.

Facebook dehumanized the person’s identity by making him or her project their lives via carefully(and socially conscious) selected pictures and words. Daily updates on trivial matters, (specifically designed for the wall, uploaded with Facebook in mind) have always been a little too public, a little too generic. It is here, Facebook being the most popular social media around, that we can start to notice fault-lines on the freedom plateau. Pakistanis are, by habit, a reactive people (I would not say nature, there is too much of cultural ‘nurture’ factors at play in our vastly over-populated, non-homogenous gene ‘swamp’). We are quick to put to words our emotions, realizing the biased, non-factual (sensationalist) nature of our media but not realizing the consequences of media hype. The medium should, ideally, dictate the style and tone of the message; social media requires a specific kind of communication, with a premium being placed on succinct, concise andmedium oriented language. What it is not is a forum for merely shortening or paraphrasing our thoughts without reflection. A little knowledge is indeed dangerous when it can be instantly shared with an audience of thousands. The nuances of the English language are but part of the story. There are nuances of fact seeking, information integrity and counter-checking with reason (and reality) which are almost completely lost on a vast majority. The case of the missing girl who was not is a case in point: Not only is it immature journalism (a by-product of decentralized ‘knowledge’ centers without any regard to training, control or merit), but it remains a shocking example of how quickly here-say is turned into fact.

Mostly, social media has been divided along the lines of the very public projection and sharing of one’s lives through snippets and media (FB) and information sharing within the word (syntax and expression) limit of Twitter. This, for me, is a DE-humanized way of living the social media world.  What it means to be a person is now (wastefully) translated to pictorial and word representation. It is this aspect of social media that also allows for small, cut-down and digestible factoids to propagate as the honest truth; there is a simplification that comes with the medium that allows for a loss of complexity and (often) this leads to a loss of objectivity.

Humans do not naturally interact in this manner. However, the very definition of being human and social is now up for a re-configuration. The revolution in Egypt was fueled by, and in return emphasized upon, social media as the new place for social mobilization and expression. The same tools can be used by alarmists, sensationalists, and ‘tea-time’ social agents for disastrous effect.

We should not be deluded by easily accessible, but ultimately false, sources of knowledge and news. We should stop, think, and conceptualize prior to expression. It is a given that media in the mainstream, for its writers, content creators, editors and readers, needs to grow up and do so quickly. Otherwise, as the Shamsul Anwar affair illustrates so clearly, we will always be easy prey to the reactionary and superficial nature of our social media. This post included, read with discretion and react to facts, established and stated as such. If nothing else, do it for self-respect.