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Freedom of the press has not been in such dire straits since India’s independence, except for the brief stark eclipse of the Emergency of 1975. A combination of factors has converged to set in motion a motivated and accelerating dismantling of the fourth estate from the outside on the one hand, and its gradual deconstruction from within, on the other. 

Since best practice in the news media is best set by its practitioners, and since in the changed media ecology, now the practitioners include the owners who have skin in the game and the consumers who are themselves producing (social) media while consuming it (hence the moniker, ‘prosumer’), a transformative pedagogical intervention in the circumstance demands: (a) recognition and appreciation of the sea of changes that have taken place in the media and are proceeding apace at a frenetic pace even as we take stock, and (b) based on such a concrete analysis, arriving at concrete measures to galvanise a social movement, no less, to harness the freewheeling forces unleashed and running amuck in the domain so as to redeem order from dystopia.

Here’s what this means:

(a) (i) The shift from the post industrial revolution era to that of the information and communication technology revolution since the mid 20th century – a revolution raging in our midst here and now – has at its core been a paradigm shift from the analogue to the digital, the implications of which are hitting us with full force, yet continue to go largely unrecognised.

(ii) The transition from analogue to digital is manifestly – but not only, nor most importantly – one of technology. It is at once also a drastic cognitive reordering and an upending of sensibility. This is the human and social dimension, as against the technological, of digital ‘disruption’. 

The shift has meant privileging breadth over height and depth, the coming into vogue of what is called ‘flatism’. It is one from linearity to non-linearity, where simultaneity and impressionism take over from sequence and logic – standing the Cartesian perspective “I think, therefore I am” on its head and replacing it with the poet Rimbaut’s insouciant “It thinks me” counter. The shift is into a pixelated world of sense........

© The Wire