Blocking the web... 

            There is indeed an irony that the internet, considered an elitist domain despite the ten million strong netizens across the country, has come to haunt the rulers. The government’s decision, last week, to block over 300 accounts is a case of knee-jerk rather than based on considerations of national security. It may be that a large number of those deserved to be taken off the public domain for they were guilty of distorting the public sphere as understood in the Habermasian sense of the term. Jurgenn Habermas, in his Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989), outlined a substantive role for the mass media in the making and the strengthening of the democracy in modern times.  

The concept, indeed, has undergone significant mutations since then and the most significant force towards that has been the leap ahead in technology altering the media ecology in ways that are mindboggling. The advent of the internet and the world wide web has rendered the public sphere into several fragments and thus created ghettoes rather than one unified platform in the couple of decades since Habermas first foregrounded the concept of public sphere. There are, in other words, numerous public spheres today than one unified as envisaged by Habermas.

In times when the traditional media (print) as well as Satellite Television have turned the universal path rather than stay pluralist, the internet provided the space for the many public spheres. In other words, the democratic experiment in India failed to internalise some of the core aspects of the constitutional principles of justice (being social, economic and political in that order); and this reflected in the shrinking space for such concerns in the mainstream media; and the web became the platform for voicing the concerns. There was, however, one major issue in this. And that is the web afforded exclusive spaces for the several concerns rather than an integrated space for a pluralist debate and resolution.

There is, for instance, an exclusive space in the web for a Dalit agenda as much as there is for an anti-social justice agenda. There is then the space for a secular campaign as much as there are spaces for a revanchist or a sectarian campaign. Notwithstanding the absence of any pre-publication censorship in the realm of print or Television, the fact is that these traditional media, which are run as business enterprises too, make it imperative that neither the newspapers nor the private Television channels can reduce themselves to exclusivist agenda only at their own peril. It is another matter that the same concern also leads them, in extraordinary situations, to subvert some of the Constitutional scheme.

The fact that the web as a medium is yet to emerge into a business model and the immense potential in them to desist a business model makes the internet being seen as a viable media to remain a propaganda machine without bothering to amass profits. Add to this the scope for receiving funds, from within and outside the country, to run such projects. Let it be known that the law prohibits newspapers and newsmagazines in the print format where the funds come from abroad. This and the reluctance of our mainstream media to take up campaigns and to indulge in any agenda setting role has made the web the only means in the making of the public sphere. Or so it is made out to be.

Hence it is a problem to either condemn or to stand up in support of the government’s decision to block sites. The fact is that the decision, coming late as it did, had denied it the legitimacy. The damage was done and the exodus from the Southern States to the North Eastern had happened. Only the naive will even argue that the sites could have been blocked earlier than it was and in that event served a purpose. The issue is that of numerous public spheres and in reality there is very little or even hardly any space in the scheme in which the web seeks to address the many concerns of these in as exclusivist a manner as it can. As for instance, there was no way to counter the misinformation on a site even while a counter campaign was possible on another site.

This, however, is only one aspect of the issue. The more serious concern is that such rumours and disinformation could provoke an exodus only in a context. And that context is the crisis of confidence in the state. The poor track record of the state, whether it is in Assam or in Bengaluru, when it comes to protecting the people’s life contributed in large measure to the people in this region believing rumours and taking the spurious messages on their mobile phones and social networking sites with such seriousness and believe them. It is, after all, a fact that the state had failed across the country.

The remedy then lies in demonstrating to the contrary. Not in blocking websites alone. And there is a message to the traditional media too. If the numerous public spheres are to be challenged and if democracy is to be salvaged, it is imperative that the consensus that marked the making of the public sphere is restored.