Smartphones and India's New Magico-Mythical Age

4/24/2019 Smartphones and India's new magico-mythical age, Opinion News & Top Stories - The Straits Times
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Smartphones and India's new magico-

mythical age
Pankaj Mishra
 PUBLISHED APR 23, 2019, 5:00 AM SGT

"On or about December 1910, human character changed," the English novelist Virginia Woolf once wrote.
It's no exaggeration to say that human character in India changed equally dramatically between 2014 and
2019 as the number of active smartphones in the country quadrupled from 100 million to 400 million.
Woolf, like many of her contemporaries in the early 20th century, was interested in how unprecedented
economic and political forces such as industrialisation and mass democracy, as well as newfangled
communication technologies such as the telegraph and telephone, were altering human relations.
The smartphone in India is also sparking earth-shaking transformations in private and public life. To
hundreds of millions of young and poor Indians, the device offers their first - and exhilaratingly
simultaneous - experience of a camera, computer, television, music player, video game, e-reader and the
Internet.
The smartphone compresses a timeline of technological advances that in the West took centuries - from
the invention of letterpress printing to the advent of photography, radio, television, personal computer and
modem - into just a few years.
A social and political revolution accompanied these technological leaps in the West: For instance, a rising
middle class empowered by the printing press cracked open the exclusive world of a tiny literati.
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India today is witnessing an even more drastic shift in class power. Anyone with a smartphone possesses
the means to express an opinion and disseminate it far and wide, not only bypassing but also confronting
the traditional elite of political representatives, technocrats and opinion makers in the media.
The experience offers few reasons to believe that faster communications will encourage greater democracy
and freedom globally. Fake news, spread through WhatsApp and Facebook, has already fuelled lynch-mob
murders in India. It now threatens to influence India's ongoing general election just as decisively as it did
the Brazilian elections late last year.
An Indian sadhu (holy man) engrossed in his smartphone ahead of a festival in north India. To hundreds of millions of
young and poor Indians, the smartphone offers their first simultaneous experience of a camera, computer, television,
music player, video game, e-reader and the Internet. PHOTO: AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Smartphone owners are constantly exposed to high volumes of information and disinformation - both of
which have a misleadingly uniform digital texture. One obvious result is the weakening of analytic ability -
the capacity to distinguish between the essential and the inessential, truth and untruth.
And when state education is poor, private education largely a con and competition fierce for even menial
jobs, conditions are ripe not for revolution, as Marxists like to believe, but for a mass exodus into the
smartphone's screen.

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Demagogic politicians adept at social media, such as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Brazilian
President Jair Bolsonaro, can only benefit when politics blends with entertainment, and campaign
commercials as well as Bollywood videos flash forth from the same portable screen.
With potentially active citizens turned into passive consumers with diminished attention spans, buttons on
voting machines tend to be pressed in the same depoliticised spirit that the "like" icon is clicked on
Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
The sociopathic behaviour enabled by smartphones is more unnerving if less visible. India, a largely
conservative society, has rapidly become the third-largest market for online pornography, much of it
extremely violent.
But the mounting addiction to fake news and images of sexual degradation is a mere symptom of a deeper
and manifold crisis in India - one provoked by a premature and rapid shift from linear text to screens, from
critical thinking to passive consumption, and from writing to image making.
The social contract in democracies depends on a broadly shared vision of reality among citizens. But what
happens when systematically manufactured and manipulated images come to constitute a whole new
alternative reality?
This question roils even the largely literate and secular societies of the West today. But it's particularly
urgent in partially literate and intensely religious societies where myth and magic already have a strong grip
on human imagination, and where habits of rational thinking are skin-deep among many in even the
country's best-educated elite (such as the scientists at the prestigious Indian Science Congress who credit
ancient Hindus with the invention of aircraft and genetic engineering).
Much of the history of the West records how near-hallucinatory images of religion and myth came to be
challenged by writing, rational thought, historical consciousness and scientific knowledge. In this account,
reason played the role of the iconoclast, shattering the irrational power of religion and myth with its
impersonal analytic tools.
In India, this planned march of progress barely got going and, in fact, has been rapidly reversed in recent
years. Man-made myth, transmitted through Facebook and WhatsApp, rather than objective reason has
emerged as the true iconoclast; it is destroying the possibility of the rational dialogue that seemed
fundamental for so long to democracy.
In a surreal irony, a feat of amazing scientific ingenuity - the smartphone - is ushering hundreds of millions
of people into a new magico-mythical age.
Given this mass regression into fantasy, it seems almost immaterial who wins or loses India's elections next
month. For the smartphone is dramatically reconfiguring human character in India, and the long-term
consequences for the country's fragile democracy and civil society are incalculable.
BLOOMBERG
•Pankaj Mishra is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. His books include From The Ruins Of Empire: The
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4/24/2019 Smartphones and India's new magico-mythical age, Opinion News & Top Stories - The Straits Times

THE STRAITS TIMES

Smartphones and India's new magico-

 PUBLISHED APR 23, 2019, 5:00 AM SGT

This site uses cookies to help us serve you better. By continuing to

This site uses cookies to help us serve you better. By continuing to

MORE FROM THE STRAITS TIMES

FROM AROUND THE WEB

Apple's credit card To Be an 3 Reasons To Apply Watch: Joanne Peh's

While You Were Sleeping: 5 stories you might have missed,

Sri Lanka explosions: Government says local Islamist group

This site uses cookies to help us serve you better. By continuing to

CUT your risk of diabetes

5 Ways to Smarter Food Management at Home

It Changed My Life: She paddles to help others stay afloat

Working towards retirement by 35

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