Breaking Down News: Age of Anxiety

2018 will be remembered as a cusp in the culture of communications, when public faith was withdrawn from large digital corporates and privacy became an overarching concern.

facebook Data leak: India to continue probe despite Cambridge Analytica closure — The building housing the Cambridge Analytica office in central London. (Reuters)

IT’S that time of year for looking back, beyond recent events like the time it took the national media to wake up to the plight of the trapped miners in Meghalaya (a disgrace, considering the coverage we gave to the football team trapped in a Thai cave), and how Donald Trump spent his Christmas (predictably, disgracefully). Domestically and internationally, 2018 will be remembered as a cusp in the culture of communications, when public faith was withdrawn from large digital corporates and some governments, and privacy became an overarching concern.

Internationally, the fallout of the Cambridge Analytica scandal of March continues, and The Guardian, one of the three media houses involved in the investigation, pointed out this week that with only 100 days to go to Brexit, it remains unclear what influence digital black box politics may have exerted over the vote to leave the European Union. In India, there was an uproar when 10 agencies were empowered to seek from communications providers the content and origination of digital communications from all computers, on pain of imprisonment.

This is happening against the backdrop of fundamental shifts in power relations brought on by convergence. Little distinction remains between government and big digital corporations, as is clear from news headlines like, ‘Plan to tweak IT rules may widen rift between government, social media companies’. The term ‘rift’ is usually applied to differences between nations — India and Pakistan, or Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Its use to describe relations between a government and some corporates is telling.

But the most fundamental change is that it has become meaningless to distinguish between online and offline media. All media houses have a strong digital presence, and TCP/IP is the pipe that delivers almost all communications — narrowcast, broadcast, conversations, real news as well as triumphs of Photoshop. They reference each other continuously and one can no longer think of them as discrete threads, but as components of a cloud.