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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Medium, message, masses -Shivam Vij

Medium, message, masses -Shivam Vij

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published Published on Mar 31, 2019   modified Modified on Mar 31, 2019
-The Telegraph

The impact the beast called social media can really have on the ensuing general elections

Sometime in the late 2000s, a young software engineer who voluntarily ran social media propaganda for the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh and the Bharatiya Janata Party got an opportunity to attend a BJP social media meet in Bangalore. Among the people who saw this young man speak there was the then Gujarat chief minister, Narendra Modi. “Why don’t you do something for me,” Modi said to him, encouraging him to promote Modi on social media. Around the same time, the Congress party was telling Shashi Tharoor to go easy on Twitter.

Today that young man is arguably one of India’s most important people, part of a select group of people informally used by the top echelons of the ruling party and the government to influence the online narrative. He’s regularly trying to make this or that trend on Twitter, running WhatsApp groups and Facebook pages that reach millions of people. When he met Modi during the 2014 campaign, the PM-to-be told him, “Keep it up. We have to make mainstream media irrelevant.”

A fragmented audience

It is difficult today to think of elections without social media. We now have the opposite problem of overestimating its impact. While 35 per cent Indians have access to the Internet, 66 per cent have access to television. TV news remains the most important medium for politicians to reach out to voters, and it’s not just because of the numbers. TV news is not as fragmented as social media. It helps you give a uniform message that can get lost in the social media noise.

The fragmented nature of social media has its own uses nevertheless. It allows parties to offer different narratives to different audiences. It allows, for instance, BJP to offer extreme Hindutva on a WhatsApp group targeted at a district in Uttar Pradesh and a narrative of, say, development and progress to an urban, elite audience on Twitter. Fragmentation also allows you to micro-target audiences.

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The Telegraph, 31 March, 2019, https://www.telegraphindia.com/india/medium-message-masses/cid/1687829


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