Why are all the newspaper front pages the same, asked a friend once. The same set of news items, more or less. Well, it’s the same country, I had answered. It would have been disturbing if they were completely different.
I was wrong. We inhabit many different countries here in Pakistan. Across space, across ethnicity, across class. In some instances, even across time, with the residents of the past at odds with those of the present.
Despite what the media will have you believe, you don’t get to see all of these Pakistans. You see only a quarter of one.
The same country that has people who gripe that the media gives too much coverage to instances of terrorism has people who feel dehumanised by there not being enough coverage in the media of acts of terror. The Pashtun belt’s gripe against media coverage would be very different from those of the Punjabi-Urdu-speaking mainstream. In the same vein, when Lahore’s hotels are asked by the law enforcement agencies not to give rooms to “Afghans”, a catch-all term these days, those on the receiving end of such directives wonder why this never got any media coverage.
Across class: the media invested a considerable amount of time on the CNG issue. Now the closure of CNG pumps is a peculiarly middle-class issue, the class that most journalists belong to. Nothing wrong with highlighting the issues of the middle-class, but the media had taken it upon itself to call the CNG issue a “ghareeb aadmi” problem.
Across class: we might have extensive media coverage of parents protesting against elite schools, who have hiked their already high fees even higher. But would we see any coverage of the dimensions of the servant quarters in the posh housing settlements in our cities? I use the word dimensions literally. Looking for a portion to rent in Lahore, the domestic help of one of the landlords, in his salespitch for the property of his employer, told me gleefully about the servant quarter that was “enough for one person.” Proceeded to lie down in it, having to bend his knees to be able to fit in. The house itself was near-palatial.
Workers’ rights in the country are only discussed when something terrible-and-sudden happens, like the Gadani incident, not terrible-and-perpetual, as is the hellish existence of the working classes all over the country.
In the middle of all of this, comes social media. Though it still has plenty of work to do when it comes to class divisions, it has started evening up things on other fronts, like perhaps ethnicity and geographical location.
Pashtun pages, Seraiki pages, Baloch pages on Facebook seek to get their points across, not to the country as a whole, but definitely to their own demographics. And the more effective of these do not rely on long newspaper articles, but factoids, memes, pictures and easy to understand captions.
That is all well and good. But the problem here is that this same decentralisation can be leveraged into actual hate speech.
American friends keep asking who are these people who voted for Trump? Well, it would do them a whole lot of good to trawl through the Facebook communities that an increasing number of people are looking at to consume news now. Keep in mind, I am not talking about the Facebook pages of news outfits that redirect you to their actual websites. No, I am talking about Facebook communities, run by a single person or a small group of people. These guys don’t vet information. Far from that, they can actually make up factoids on the fly, thinking a lie here and there is okay if it is for the greater good.
True, in America’s case, talk radio played a role as well. Though both liberals and conservatives have taken to podcasts of late, daytime talk radio is a conservative affair, with very few mainstream pundits hearing in to know what greater America was thinking.
The great prophet of his time Marshal McLuhan spoke of the “retribalisation” that electronic media brings. That very retribalisation has come into full force in social media where whole worlds exist that we might not know anything about.
Donald Trump spoke to a rage that many in America feel. White unemployment, increasingly from the middle-class as well, has led to a lot of frustration an anti-immigrant feeling. The reasons for this are globalisation and — I think this isn’t discussed enough — automation. There is nothing (nothing) Hillary Clinton or Trump can do about automation and artificial intelligence. But Trump spoke to that frustration and created several sets of bogeymen.
Would one be stupid to believe in those? Perhaps. Would one be arrogant not to look at the seismic changes taking place in the American economy and call his supporters deplorables? Perhaps.
Increasingly bizarre are the Pakistanis who are gleefully dispelling the stupidity of American voters; some of those Pakistanis believe that Dr Qadeer Khan had offered former president Zardari to produce electricity for one paisa per unit for eight thousand years. These Pakistanis believe this because they read it online.
There are phones — and tablet computers — from China that are getting cheaper by the day. Bandwidth is getting cheaper by the day. Roman Pashto, Sindhi, Seraiki, Punjabi and, of course, Urdu, are becoming increasingly common on social media. The need to use social media is feeding into literacy. I am talking about — forgive the tongue twister — literacy literally. Some who couldn’t read or write can, now, because they needed to communicate on WhatsApp. Facebook is becoming an awami medium.
And there are huge, huge swathes of unknowns living, breathing, pulsating on social media. The pundits on American TV, liberals and conservatives alike, did not see the massive underground realignment. Our own Pakistani media is even worse.
This new world might be ending the champagne baths of the press barons, yes, it might be giving a voice to the disenfranchised, yes, but it is also leading to a scary world. A world where an incredibly vacuous jerk, who openly disrespects other races, one who is found out to be a sex offender, becomes, through the ballot, the single most powerful human being on the planet.