The importance of being loud
If Shakespeare were around, he’d have changed his line to “The whole Twitter’s a stage and everybody is dying for attention.” To understand…
If Shakespeare were around, he’d have changed his line to “The whole Twitter’s a stage and everybody is dying for attention.” To understand this phenomenon, one would have to peek into the economy of twittersphere. It’s impossible to know what’s going on otherwise. You’ll have to pose some uncomfortable questions after observing the trends: Who are we trying to impress by losing out on sleep? Where do all our efforts on the timeline ultimately go? What could possibly change if you were to quit the platform today and never come back? How long can a piece of social media function the way it does without destroying itself? Why this addiction to tamasha, a tempered term for outrage, day in and day out?
One word. Opinion.
Opinion happens to be the currency of Twitter and like all currencies, it not only holds power but also the ability to exchange power. Once upon a time, not very long ago, very few — the elites, if you may — were meant to be opinionated. The commoners had opinions too but theirs were limited to village fair, barber shop and family dinner. Moreover, nobody cared what they thought except on the election day. Only the highly educated lot knew how to put an opinion to work. The rest of the society danced to the tunes of the resulting outcomes.
To be granular, not much has changed since then in terms of the structure. Few continue to decide for the most. However, the head count of those who value opinion has risen exponentially. All of a sudden, everybody has something to say on a topic—real or imagined—at any given point of time. This twist in the plot has a lot to do with Twitter because it’s a massive platform in terms of influence, not sheer figures. With less than 350 million using Twitter on a daily basis, it dwarfs against the amount of activity Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Snapchat register. But Twitter has what the rest of the players can only dream of: the perfect stage for drama. If Trump has to say something ridiculous, he tweets despite the character limitations. He doesn’t log on to Facebook to post long paragraphs on how tremendously wrong others are or how bigly right he is.
That’s the beauty of Twitter.
A place that hosts everyone from every strata of the world—be it the Pope (although he doesn’t tweet personally) or the Dalai Lama, be it El Chapo (although he is behind bars now) or Edward Snowden, be it Barack Obama (although he hasn’t posted anything this month) or JK Rowling— providing the inimitable lectern to funnel one’s thoughts out for public consumption. And it turns out, no matter how busy a person claims to be, he has the time to check out what the opinionated ones have to say. Precisely why the media binges on Twitter as the latter makes the job of the former much easier than it’s supposed to be.
Got it?
Nope?
Good.
Now you’d understand why Sonu Nigam woke up on Monday this week to rant against the mosque’s loudspeaker in his neighbourhood. He made a legit argument against noise but an opinion is coloured by the political environment it’s mentioned in. To say that he did what he did for attention’s sake is like one fish accusing another of being wet. Twitter is all about attention and more importantly, about testing our short attention span. He merely exercised his right to express his opinion and his discomfort. The downside of the whole circus is it became less about loudspeaker and more about azaan. In an ideal world, he’d have been embraced by the self-appointed liberals for daring to say something they’d never do — at least not in our country. All of a sudden, it became an us-versus-them argument with religious elements dragged in unnecessarily. By taking a stand against loudspeakers, the silk-voiced crooner set into motion a discussion that might help us see where the problem lies: the unabashed noise that religion is in India. Imagine our country without those blaring objects looking down upon us in public spaces. Wouldn’t it be peaceful to get rid of all the loudspeakers at once from all probable paths of Indian life? Of course.
OK, let’s get back to reality a bit now, shall we? Given the shade of bigotry in vogue, we won’t even reach the hallowed ground of accepting that loudspeakers are lame metaphors for our ego. It has nothing to do with our faith. Regardless, both the wingers are busy playing the mudslinging game. Besides, even if the public eventually opens its eyes to the truth, the political class can’t let go of their instrument of mass deception during election rallies. There’s no speech without loudspeakers under the open sky. They know that. In the absence of noise, they’d be irrelevant and that’d be unacceptable for them. We may not have our faith in the system but they have unbridled faith in the idiocy of the masses irrespective of which religion a person follows. To our pseudo-leaders, opinions come and go, whether online or offline. What eventually matters is the noise. After all, noise is enormously powerful because it’s the most secular thing in our country.