The best way to know the self is feeling oneself at the moments of reckoning. The feeling of being alone, just with your senses, may lead you to think more consciously. More and more of such moments may sensitize ‘you towards you’, towards others. We become regular with introspection and retrospection. We get ‘the’ gradual connect to the higher self we may name Spirituality or God or just a Humane Conscious. We tend to get a rhythm again in life. We need to learn the art of being lonely in crowd while being part of the crowd. A multitude of loneliness in mosaic of relations! One needs to feel it severally, with conscience, before making it a way of life. One needs to live several such lonely moments. One needs to live severallyalone.

Saturday, 28 July 2012

2011 MASS UPRISINGS: THE NEW MASS MEDIA

I wrote this write-up for a research journal during May 2012. I am now publishing it on my blog in parts.

2011 MASS UPRISINGS: SOCIAL MEDIA TRENDS - PART-XI

THE NEW MASS MEDIA

The Internet is the modern mass media and is bound to become the dominant mode of communication with rapidly advancing technologies that make convergence of electronic media, print media and mobile communication on Internet platforms a ‘viable to masses’ option in the near future. A simple corollary of 2011 protests puts it in the right perspective:

Protests grew rapidly in countries and precipitated in significantly large mass mobilization where Internet was free or somewhat beyond regulation to work as the mass media giving, in-turn, free run to the social media platforms. The borderless world of the technological communication helped build the global audience as the domestic news spread through the conveniently porous borders.

In case of Tunisia, Egypt, Russia and India, the feeling of unrest or betrayal by the rulers was there among the masses. Social media fueled that feeling to become large protest movements.

In, Libya, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain, the potential of social media to fuel the unrest was either absent owing to poor technology infrastructure or was almost suppressed.

Yes, the Internet has its own negatives and its increasing use is bound to bring many issues of concern with it, but at the moment, it is being used as the foreground where some of the biggest mass uprisings are taking place. And Internet is doing it by bringing the prominence of the public sphere back again.

Citizens are discussing the problems that affect them. They are getting feedbacks in real time. They are connecting to the like-minded ones in the pursuit of the speedy grievance redressal giving rise to the group formation trends. 

And when there is something endemic affecting a vast stretch of the population, such discussions are giving way to the mass uprisings. It might be the return of the public sphere as Jürgen Habermas had once expected.

It is premature to write whether the current mass-uprisings would lead the ‘representative democracy-reliant nation-states’ to give way to ‘deliberative democracy-reliant political setup’ with an activist public sphere as Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Bahrain, Russia, India and the global economic village, all are in the first stage of the upheaval and no one knows what shape the rehabilitation would take; how participatory would it be?

©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com/