Social media as a soapbox confederacy

Nosheen Kapoor

SOCIAL media — Facebook, to be precise, has done it again! It's given a voice, a face and a presence to an incident, that in another time or place, would have gone unnoticed, not acted upon and most definitely, unheard of. 

The recent Facebook post, by the 20-year-old, Jasleen Kaur about the man who harassed her at the Tilak Nagar traffic lights, has received overwhelming attention and about 26,000 social shares. Social media can be credited with bridging international gaps and being a digitised soapbox for many socially relevant issues that were till now not the domain of the common population. 

Your picture and song-sharing medium a political platform? A medium that actually grants freedom of expression has now become a tool to publicly penalise perpetrators of violence, gender inequality and other regressive modes of human behaviour. Of course, Mark Zuckerberg didn't anticipate the power of this torpedo called Facebook when he launched it in  the ocean, called Internet. 

Well, neither did the innocent users until the first-time activism was formally introduced and spread through social sharing websites about  four years ago. From the Arab Spring of 2011 to the hashtag activism of today, it’s been a long journey. 

So when Jasleen Kaur case came to the fore, “socially” conscious and aware users didn't blink an eye to hail or hate it. Amidst the debates about the veracity of the girl's story and the accused's defence, Facebook/ Twitter emerged as the court and “citizen justice” as the law that rules. The questions which we are now confronted by are  whether social media should be used as a redressal for grievances. 

Can public shaming correct the moral fabric of a society? Is using social media to acknowledge such incidents justified or is it a misdirected effort that results in nothing more than the proverbial 15 seconds of fame (and shame, as in this case)? Should an individual be penalised publicly by a highly opinionated, to a certain extent fanatic, yet anonymous collective? 

When a girl posts a picture of the “offender” online, what do we make of it? Is it an act of activism or simply a claim to fame (as  alleged by the “accused”) in a highly digitised society? 

Call it a platform, a digital forum or simply your personal laundromat to wash whatever linen you deem washable in public, social-sharing websites such as Facebook and Twitter have contributed tremendously in changing human behaviour and communication culture. From blurring boundaries between private and public selves, information overload to an overkill with visual stimuli, social websites have invoked both love and hate among users, along with addiction. But, these websites also have to be credited for granting a crucial power to citizens of the world. They have democratised the right to freedom of expression and the virtue of voice at a mass level like no other medium has. Research shows that social sharing websites have helped in successfully putting many social, political and cultural agendas in the limelight. Oppression and violence that were earlier carried out under the guise of native cultures are now under a scanner, thanks to the power of the word and the tools that are spreading them. 

It was  this power that the 20-year-old also exercised when she posted a photo of her “offender”on Facebook. She not only set a precedent that can deter any young man from alleged lecherous behaviour but also for suppressed genders to break this culture of silence that they are often shamed into, coercively. One would like to reiterate that the effort is not to find out the “truth” or endorse popular opinion. Most readers know only as much as they have read on different websites, such as Storypick or the Huffington Post (yes they covered it).  One has read of the support that the girl is being offered and the hate she has had to experience. Add to this the only witness to the entire incident was seen denying every bit of the girl’s story on a national news channel the very next day. He au contraire called the victim abusive and inappropriate. So the truth is still to be revealed, but thanks to the over zealous response to the incident, nobody could ignore it, not even the police. One is uncertai\n whether such incidents will become precursors to a utopic society, especially if what is online is not replicated effectively offline, in the real world. Contextually speaking, the divide between those who can access  the Internet and those who can't is too large to hope for a change in civil culture and society at the national level. Nevertheless, contribution of these websites in initiating change cannot be denied. In  countries where gender inequality, power struggles and political imbalance have ruled, people have sought refuge in enjoying freedoms online, even though vicariously. There are many examples of how Facebook has helped women and artists from around the world to build online communities to fight violence, undue censoring, silence and eventually break the glass ceilings that  destroy their identity. Social websites are valuable tools for empowering those without voices but should not be treated as shaming and humiliating mediums. A recently published review of the book by Jennifer Jacquet, Is Shame Necessary? New Uses for an Old Tool in The Economist, talks about the sneaky undertones of a mob culture that seems to sear under the garb of political and social freedom online. The reviewer writes, “In a market society where almost every ethical principle has its price, an appeal to a disinterested sense of civic duty seems at times nostalgic, if not futile. But bring someone's reputation into it, and suddenly you get results. From community-sanitation programmes in Bangladesh to American initiatives to embarrass high-end tax-dodgers into coughing up, governments and activists alike have cottoned on to the effectiveness of shaming.”

Humiliation and shaming do bring in quick results but is there a collateral damage we seem to be overlooking? May be an “offender” needed to be punished. But what about his future and those impending reference checks that all career pursuits and matrimonial prospects entail? Of course, nobody thinks that far in a fit of aggression that it was a lesson to be learned and not a stigma that would stain him for the rest of his life? 

Freedom and power come with tremendous responsibility. There are no better places than social media websites to put your own potential for power and freedom to test. Not because there will be repercussions for misdirected ire and brashness (committed online or offline) but because the repercussions will be permanent — digitised and archived for future social networking generations. Till then, all those riders on the storm, must know this: The damsel today is armed not with a sword, but with the phone! 

The writer is Head, Copywriing Division, Cueblocks Technologies, an IT Company.