I am not big on social media. For that matter, I am not big on social. But that’s not news to those who know me.
I intermittently scroll my Facebook page, and the last time I logged on to Twitter was about six years ago, but there’s enough in the air to know what is happening in that version of the world. Social media, however, has helped me know some people better; people who, of course, feel more confident (and definitely more compelled) to communicate through it.
This revelation—about what certain people are—had happened at individual levels before: you know, some classmate whom I had once thought to be rather take-on-the-world turned out to be the worst line-toer of them all, and such like. But larger, mass-level revelations take place in the immediate hours after some big-bang event: Attacks and assaults on people, ridiculous and offensive comments by public figures, political churn…
The last such event in my diary was the attack on the office of Charlie Hebdo in Paris. The next time I logged on to Facebook (after the attack) I saw innumerable people posting ‘Je Suis Charlie’ in various forms—pictures of people with placards proclaiming Je Suis Charlie, status messages saying the same, etc. I don’t know French, apart from perhaps Je ne sais pas and s’il vous plais. So, I did not know what Je suis Charlie meant. I gathered it was a message of solidarity or consolation.
But, when I did learn what it meant, I was rather stunned. Did these people, all posting Je suis Charlie, even know what Charlie Hebdo stood for? Had they ever seen their cartoons? Did they agree with what Charlie Hebdo portrayed? Knowing what I do about these people, I have grave doubts; it was simply a term that originated in France, that caught on like a wild-fire trend there, and that some people in India wanted to be seen as agreeing with.
I had seen Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons before as well (after the uproar over the Prophet cartoon a few years ago). And I had found them disgusting; if that is what they pass off as satire, then they clearly do not know what satire means. No, that does not mean I think their cartoonists should be killed (if I don’t like them, I just don’t read them. Quite simple); but I am definitely not Charlie Hebdo.
And then, thankfully (but predictably), after the initial adrenaline-fuelled support for the French newspaper waned, there appeared more articles that presented alternative opinions, not blind submissions. Among them were cartoons that highlighted how lampooning Jews is hailed as anti-Semitism, but lampooning Muslims is labeled satire. [As an aside, I wonder what reactions on social media would have been like when MF Husain had painted his versions of Hindu goddesses. My mother, at that time, had said, ‘Let him try and paint similar versions of the Prophet and we’ll see how people of his own religion react.’] With Charlie Hebdo, it was heartening to see that there are people—and this is the positive revelation of social media—who think before they speak, think before they write, and do not feel compelled to join any mindless, senseless mob of opinion simply because that’s what they need to do to appear progressive, liberal, and
These insights into the nature of those I know, no matter how closely or tenuously, would perhaps have eluded me had it not been for social media. So, yes, in a way, I am thankful for it. It is just that in the real world, I find fewer and fewer people who have the knowledge or the spine to stand up to a rigorous argument without becoming as shrill and senseless as their online opinions.
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PS: Here are two quotes on the issue of the much-touted “freedom of speech” from the one who has been reviled, exiled, exalted and celebrated for exercising that very freedom--Salman Rushdie.
“What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.”
“One of the problems with defending free speech is you often have to defend people that you find to be outrageous and unpleasant and disgusting.”
