We the Twitter

22nd April, 2010

It entered into the public space as a humble notice board, made inroads into our private space with the hook of fan followers, gradually made its presence felt with occasional scoops posted by the celebrities, started spreading its tentacles into the neo-techy masses and before we realised it had driven the otherwise largely technophobic nation into its tweet zone. From politicians to cricketers, film stars to media professionals; it seems everybody wants to tweet and be followed. Many have become addicted to the social media site and can’t seem to stay away from it. So, what is Twitter?

Is it the new face of expression in a society groping for recognition beyond mere identity of “We the Nation”? Has India readily accepted twitter as the new face of tangible recognition? More the followers the better standing you have in the society, so it seems. Facts suggest more than what twitter is supposed to stay for. In a developing society like India one may have to run from pillar to post to get a ration card or any other identity card, something that is not worthy of flaunting. But for the twitter exposed lot a twitter id is much easier to get and more fancy to flaunt.

When you first look at Twitter, it seems as though it is just a large bunch of random thoughts. It is actually much more than that. It is over hyped, over exposed and over estimated channel of communication. Twitter is being used and abused like no other media vehicle. It is true that one of the biggest scams of the era involving Cricket, Politics, Money and Sex has been exposed on twitter only. But twitter can’t take the credit of any worthy contribution to this. Had the mainstream media not followed it up, this twitter post would have gone as unnoticed as thousands of others in the day.

After all, everybody is tweeting. It seems twitter is the new public address system in the country and every one is busy twitting good, bad and ugly without any censorship-legal, ethical or whatever. However, this is India and definitely the soci0-political spectrum is not as tweety as France where the President asks for public opinion on political and personal agenda through his tweets.

Twitter, as a matter of fact, has been snowballing into the political spectrum of the nation ever since a Union Minister with a fair degree of international exposure during his stint with the United Nations started tweeting his not-so-politically-correct views on various issues. Nobody had then imagined that twitter posts are going to be his nemesis in the days ahead. The accusation against Union Minister Shashi Tharoor by the IPL Commissioner and Mastermind of Gambling Racket called IPL Cricket is just the precursor of the emerging trends of Indian politics. The victim of tweets, Indian politics has added a new vocabulary in its lexicon and vendetta politics will be henceforth referred as Twitter Politics.

The first high-profile casualty of twitter posts is not just the resignation of a Union Minister, or the surfacing of what seems to be the biggest betting racket of India thus far, called the IPL Cricket. The inherent dangers are deep rooted. If tweets are the way to go, I am afraid life in the public space will be less respectful, lesser trustworthy, and even lesser accountable to the democratic institutions. Imagine a minister making policy announcements on twitter rather than in the Parliament. Can a twitter mandate replace the trouble of conducting an exhaustive election procedure?

Probably those who conceptualised the idea of twitter first had no idea as to how BIG IDEA they had been working on. The cost of running a country like India can be brought to almost negligible if twitter has its way. The law makers would not have the trouble of travelling all their way to Parliament from respective constituencies in the remote areas. The easiest possible public address system called twitter is there to take care of the causes and grievances of the nation. Union Budgets will also be tweeted and law makers along with the common man on the streets can retweet their opinion on it.

Twitter was actually meant for interaction limited to commercial and personal reasons. It is now also being used for political and other vested interest purposes. Now that Twitter is in the mainstream, with all of its tentacles reaching as far into society as it does, it is not going anywhere anytime soon. The advocates of tweet politics will soon suggest taking the advantages of twitter and seeing how it can contribute to transform the democratic and institutional fabric of a developing nation like India. Of course, there is a price tag to this universal public address system that demands a thorough cost-benefit analysis. The question is whether the Indian society in its collective consciousness is ready to pay the price of “We the Twitter”?