Understanding the Age of Information

Neil Postman (1985), Amusing ourselves to death, Penguin books, New York, pp.184

Neil Postman’s classic manifesto on the influence of television on popular culture, written in the 1980s, speaks directly to our world today that is inundated with information. What is fascinating about this work is the uncanny precision with which the author imagines the future standing on the cusp of the internet revolution. The basic premise of his argument is that there are two alternatives possible for the us, as the next waves of technology wash us over- Orwellian dystopia or Huxleyan trivial future.

In his most famous book 1984, George Orwell vividly anticipated a new captive culture that was subjected to constant surveillance and control, resulting in a world imprisoned in externally-manifested oppression. On the other hand, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World imagined a new generation with an infinite appetite for distraction which was eventually reduced to passivity and egoism. As we reflect on the seven waves of digital revolution that has given us machine learning and internet-of-things (where even ordinary objects are imbued with a semblance of ‘intelligence’), we seem to be increasingly staring at a Huxleyan universe.

The great transformation

The book is divided into two parts. In the first section, Postman discusses the characteristics of the enormous revolution through which we are living. In the second part, the author examines various spheres of life that has metamorphosed, thanks to new media. Using an American centric vantage point, Postman analyzes the totalitarian manner in which television progressively transformed the way we understand and interpret information. The first two chapters give a sketch of how the new medium created a new metaphor (way of using language) and epistemology (way of knowing). In a trenchant comparison, he contrasts what visual medium has creatively destroyed that the typographic world of the printing press had given us earlier. His analysis prods us to think about how the internet has disrupted a world that was governed by visual media.

To begin with, the speed, quantity and quality of information has changed and so has the need for relevance, positionality and coherence. It seems that standard setting by experts and counsel from experience is increasingly irrelevant as the entire world is reduced to millions of data points and machines can decipher patterns that we cannot. Furthermore, democratization of the digital universe has ensured that we are not required to have eligibility of entry or membership or even purpose when we inhabit the internet world. The need for well-thought out exposition seems to be over and with it an appetite for public discourse. Consequently, appreciation of silence, ability for reasoned arguments and adherence to self-imposed restraint are becoming rare qualities. The fragmentation of information with no attention to sequencing, meaning, value and scale leads to the generation of an immense amount of information packs that momentarily invade our lives incoherently and chaotically. As a result, we become the product and consumers of the information age.

There are several ways to get introduced to the theme of how digital technology affects various facets of our life. It is important and urgent that we educate ourselves through the well-thought of arguments of others who know more than we do and have patiently examined these questions vigorously. Jaron Lanier’s (the father of virtual technology) You are not a Gadget is an excellent introduction to the philosophy of what it means to be ‘encapsulated’. Oxford Professor Victor Mayor-Schönberger’s (co-authored with Kenneth Cukier) Big Data gives a comprehensive description of the specific challenges and actionable points that we can take as we step into new realities. The books and articles of Eric Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee present a mainstream perspective that excitedly anticipates the future in a digitally immersed world. Garry Kasparov’s part-memoir Deep Thinking evaluates how humans can thrive in an age of artificial intelligence. But a great primer is still Postman’s manifesto that helps us to understand when technology becomes a medium of culture and how it transforms our minds. In a style that is crisp with arguments that are cogent, Postman appeals to our reason and rationality and delivers his fare with wit and wisdom. An absolutely delightful and important book for our times!

Exploring the Conscience of Art

The Noise of Time (2016), Julian Barnes, Jonathan Cape

I was waiting for Barnes’ new novel for a while now after the Man Booker winning ‘The Sense of an Ending’. This new novel explores the conscience of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich through an intimate third person narrator who meets him at three crucial moments of his life- as a man awaiting the repercussions of a dictator in the beginning, an ambassador of the same regime to world in the second and the torn lonely artist making his private tribulations into music praying that death liberates his art from life in the final moment. What interested me was the way we wind up with Shostakovich as he is thinking to himself what it means to be him, an artist, a Russian, a man hounded by power in public and art in private. We see with him how it all began on the wrong note for him with his name a mere echo of his father and how he shuffled through his life into the inevitable tragedy of betrayal that life set up.

We are faced with two impossible choices- to be honest, brave and dead or to be deceptive, fearful and alive. That is the kind of duality with no middle ground when power of that kind as we found in Stalinist Russia pervades life. There is no meaning to freedom and all roads lead to deception. Shostakovich’s encounters with Soviet tutors are some of the best parts of the book. They are sent to be patient with the genius, deliberately working through his stubborn mind ridden with guilt of living with such uncompromising vicissitudes. How the first tutor of the Stalinist world teaches him to begin with obeisance through remembering what it means to be part of history by teaching it to oneself. And how the last tutor encourages him to forget the past when he has barely begun to forgive. Caught between memory and forgetting, courage and cowardice, life and death, Shostakovich drowns the noise of time with music.

The larger questions we are posed with are who does art belong to? And how do you speak truth to power? Art belongs to everybody and nobody at the same time. As Shostakovich reminisces the posterity is free to do what it wants with his art, his music. It is both theirs to judge and not theirs to understand. That is because the truth in art stands all time while the truth in life is dealt with in small measures till it resembles no truth at all. With these interesting questions to explore, I found the novel intimate and interesting.

Who’s Afraid of the Written Word?

 

   









 

‘The value of art lies in the love it engenders, not hatred. It’s love that makes books last.’

             Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton

 'It is a dangerous power in the hands of a government; the right to determine what shall be read and what shall not...’

             Jawaharlal Nehru (1929)

The latest furore over censorship in India is at the publisher Penguin India’s decision to withdraw Professor Wendy Doniger’s book ‘The Hindus: An Alternative History’ (Penguin USA 2009, Penguin India 2010) and turn all the existing copies into pulp. Penguin has been fighting a four year law suit against Shiksha Bachao Andalon, an organisation that took umbrage at Professor Doniger’s scholarship and writing as ‘a shallow, distorted and non serious presentation of Hinduism’ riddled with ‘heresies and inaccuracies’. On the grounds of disparaging a religion and culture, the petition comes under Indian Penal Code 153 A (causing enmity between religious groups) and 295 A (deliberate and malicious acts to outrage religious feelings). What is curious and revolting about this outcome is that Prof Doniger’s work notwithstanding her controversial positions has been denied the critical scrutiny it deserves and the upholding of the stifling archaic laws codified under a colonial government and the alarming frequency with which it has been used recently in India to silence works of art and scholarship.

India can ill afford to disavow its history and heritage of tolerance and the presence of a democratic and secular polity. It is a land of a million gods and every four hundred miles or so, a language changes. Its culture has been born and nourished in the silent valleys of its mountains by its tribes as much as on the shingled beaches of the coasts by the merchants and foreigners. Its people have thronged the vast plains, kingdoms have flourished along the twisting banks of epic rivers and its capacious terrain of space and time can accommodate various voices with the munificence of a gracious host. In India everyone is both an insider and an outsider and to nurse a peevish scornful attitude to the other is unfriendly as much as rankle the other severely and ask him to exit without compunction is unworthy. There is nothing fixed and unassailable here except perhaps the loquaciousness of the argumentative Indian that Amartya Sen famously described in the book ‘The Argumentative Indian’. In this land of such vicissitudes, there has also been a capricious mood to be brittle and vicious with someone one does not agree with. 

The fate that met Prof Doniger’s work has its chilling parallels in many works of fact and fiction, that have been shown the exit door from India under three main rubrics- that of offence, obscenity and threatening national security. Two of the laws that support grounds of censorship are codified as is the freedom of free expression, guaranteed as a fundamental right in the Indian Constitution.  The two articles in question are Indian Penal Code (IPC) section 295 A that recommends a punishment of three years of imprisonment or fine or both for insult or attempt to insult as given by ‘deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs by words spoken or written or by signs or visible representations’.  Article 153 A of the IPC  states that ‘promoting enmity between different groups on ground of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language etc by doing acts prejudiced to the maintenance of harmony through words, signs or representation, acts to disturb public tranquillity, organisation of a movement to enforce criminal violence or offence committed in place of worship. Besides these sections often used against artists and writers, the Indian Customs has sweeping powers not to allow any printed material enter the country that they think is objectionable. Together this triad of elements prove dangerous in the hands of intolerant religious and cultural groups and pro-rich privacy laws.

A history of censorship in India in the last century makes the case amply clear. As early as 1930s, when India was still in the throes of colonial government, Katherine Mayo’s ‘The Face of Mother India’ was banned for being a ‘drain inspector’s report’. This string of banning books portraying Indian negatively would become commonplace instead of pointing out shoddy research and partisanship if found any. Then there was the ubiquitous category of ‘salacious content and obscenity’. Arthur Miles’ ‘Land of the Lingam’ went out and so did Bernard Stein’s ‘The Scented Garden’. There were also inexplicable bans on certain books for ‘intemperate expose of the powerful class’ as in Max Wylie’s ‘Hindu Heaven’ and Frank Richards ‘Old Soldier Sahib.’ As Nilanjana Roy describes in her excellent essay on book bans in India, from the 1940s a new category of banned literature came into prominence- that of religious outrage and sedition. Perhaps, it was inevitable in the climate of growing nationalism and the looming partition of India . Post independence, ‘anti national’ journals and specific works of fiction came under the scanner. With the brief flirting with emergency in the mid 1970s, books that ‘misrepresented’ the image of India were also shown the door.  In the beginning of the new millennium however, specific state governments ruled by the ideologies of specific political parties have a strong say in the kinds of books that can circulate in the state. For instance, Jayashree Mishra’s book on Rani Lakshmi Bai did not find favour with the Uttar Pradesh government as was Habib Tanvir’s plays in Chattisgarh. Rohinton Mistry’s ‘Such a long Journey’ found frowning reception in Maharashtra for inaccurately portraying the Maharashtrians.  Arundhati Roy had to fight long court battles to get her Booker winning ‘God of Small Things’ going in many states.

What piques one in the current case is that there was effectively no call for a ban and yet Penguin recanted after four years of legal pursuit.  What is disappointing is that the freedom to imagine and express is curbed and along with it the implicit freedom from fear. What is illuminating is that from the times of Socrates to Jesus Christ to Galilieo, it has always been trials of heresy and wars wrought in the name of religious persecution.  The secular and even anti religious tradition of Boccaccio, Chaucer and Rabelais teaches us that any move that questions our intent also questions our freedom and there are only two positions in this argument. Either you are with the idea of freedom to freely express thoughts, to contest and debate opinion in the private and the public sphere without being afraid of offending anyone. Factual inaccuracies can be countered by scholarship and obfuscation of truth by revelation. Words have to be battled with words, thoughts with thoughts all under the purview of reason and certainly non-violence. This freedom of artistic and intellectual liberty is not a luxury but the life line of progress of human kind, that enrich and clothe their lives with words, dreams and memories. You cannot be coerced to think selectively, act submissively and dream with conformity. There are as many vantage points as there are minds and what is hidden from a view is revealed in another. The secular front that has an open mind cannot be divided, unorganised or indifferent.  It is worth taking a stand for books today because as Heinrich Heine presciently remarked ‘where they burn books, they will in the end burn people too.’

Dialogue of a Different Kind

Dialogue, An Art & Culture Magazine, Collector’s Edition, 2014

The People of Indian Origin (PIO) web portal was launched in June 2010 as a monthly web magazine that focussed on art, culture and politics of contemporary India, as seen by a committed group of young people. It was the brainchild of one man, an expatriate Indian, who felt the necessity to carry an India that he could not live in or experience, but only speak about from his memories to his children. He entrusted the process of re-discovering India, lost to Indians like him abroad, to a team of young Indians who lived and breathed India’s culture and politics. From its inception, this magazine had a unique appeal. The contours of the magazine shaped up from the conviction that there is a place and a purpose for critically evaluating both inherited wisdom and lived experience in India, the landscape of its culture and the pulse of its history. Based on the core values of secular orientation, critical spirit, freedom of expression and social responsibility, the web portal made reasoned analysis and comments.

This Collector’s Edition of PIO Indians web portal goes beyond the horizons and the limited mandate of the web version. Christened ‘Dialogue’, the print magazine seeks to bring together the best of the web portal while rectifying some of the shortcomings, by improving the content and expanding the profile of contributors. Dialogue has articles on art, music, film and literature. An overview of the essays and commentaries cover areas of politics, economy, communalism and social justice that are very much relevant in India today. Interviews and conversations with writers, actors, artists, travellers and editors provide a trenchant view of how they perceive their art and their craft, and the challenges they face in accomplishing a vision. Tributes are given to three historic personalities in India through an essay that seeks to re-discover the legacy of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister and founding statesman of India, a short column on intolerance that banished a great Indian painter on charges of obscenity and a myopic national memory that forgot the illustrious founder-editor of Indian comics. A memoir that brings out the evocative experience of overcoming the English language barrier is peculiar to most post colonial societies, especially India, where the English language is a passport to a bright future. A historic view of the evolution of street theatre as a political weapon of the masses and the critical analysis of the depiction of violence in post partition cinema and novel, succinctly brought out in two essays, deal with the various cross currents in the Indian cultural scene today.

A separate section projects young and upcoming artists, dancers, musicians and song writers, which brings out the concerns of a new generation of Indians, who shoulder the responsibility of preserving and interpreting its ancient texts and traditions. A selection of fiction and poetry from young writers are presented as a portfolio. This special section explores other responses to the experience of being Indian that defies narrative journalism. There is also a representation of photo features by young photographers who brought to us first-rate stories of nature and wildlife, culture and people. 

The compilation of this special edition celebrates the life and work of two years of a dedicated team and their coming together in a happy reunion in a bigger canvas. The selection of stories and articles are representative and not exhaustive. In a way, Dialogue began as an off-shoot of the original web portal but it has transcended its boundaries and acquired a distinct voice and identity of its own. It is the culmination of an extremely courageous and idealistic venture by a young group, sustained by an encouraging and committed readership in India and abroad. 

The copies of the special issue can be had by writing to dialoguemagazine@yahoo.com or the editors, Deepa Kylasam Iyer (deepa_7ki@yahoo.co.in) and Francis Kuriakose (francyge83@yahoo.co.uk)