Have truth, start a website

But is it necessarily a good thing?

Some months ago I was discussing the issue with an American media analyst who worked with an organisation that devoted itself to expanding access to communication networks telephones, cable TV to the poorest and most remote communities in the country. He was almost evangelistic in his efforts to convince me that the Web was the medium that was going to free the world.

His argument was that since the existing media i.e. print and television was owned by a handful of global corporations or at least owners with vested interests, news was never objective or representing the interests of the common man. His own organisation in fact spent much of its resources trying to wrest channels for community programming from the corporations that owned cable networks. Additionally, he maintained, popular media, since it was focused on the mainstream, rarely reflected the aspirations and problems of minority or weaker communities such as blacks and homosexuals.

The Net, he insisted, would change all that. Would it? I have my doubts. The thing about the Web being a free for all is that everyone gets to ventilate. Not just communities suffering from discrimination such as homosexuals and African Americans but also homophobes and the Ku Klux Klan. There is no reason either to believe that popular websites catering to the mainstream will reflect in any diminished way the biases that exist in the prevailing media. Also, given the exploding traffic on the Net, isn8217;t it likely that at some point people are going to spend huge sums of money on advertising themselves off the Net and, at some point, on the Net? And won8217;t we then just end up with the same inequalities that we started out with? Perhaps I am being overly pessimistic. That one outcome will be the existence of more easily accessible alternatives, which in itself is a challenge to monopoly.

But at the moment what I am really concerned about is another aspect of the issue. This is what I would call the tyranny of subjectivity. It struck me recently when I was reading an interview with the prominent underworld figure Chota Rajan in an issue of the newsmagazine The Week. Is it true that you have started a website? Rajan was asked. quot;No, it is not truequot;, he said, quot;but I will start one, I think. People sh-ould know the truth about me and my men. There are too many falsehoods spread by the police.quot;

It is interesting to speculate on what Rajan8217;s website would consist of. A business profile? Directions to Ganpati pandals? List of aides who died in combat? The point to be noted however is that he claims to have a truth8217; and feels the Net is a good place to express it. Why not? The police have a truth too. So perhaps do Chota Rajan8217;s victims. And what about Dawood, Rajan8217;s dreaded rival? Does he have a truth too?

And how are we to make sense of all these various truths? According to the media analyst I referred to earlier, the existence of multiple truths was a wonderful thing because then, people can just make up their own minds8217;. True but do people really want or have the time to sift through competing stories for the correct one? And would they still be in a position to do that given that all the stories are essentially subjective and possibly misleading? If all information was provided in a Rashomon-like fashion, would the reader really be better off? I think not.

The perils of having too much information have already been observed with the plethora of TV channels all over the world. And as one more medium adds extravagantly to the information overload people are going to clamour for experts to cut through the clutter, do the job of considering all the options and discarding those unnecessary, of giving them one fixable objective truth. This though is probably still some distance away.

For the time being it seems to me that certain qualities that were once considered integral to the process of ascertaining the truth, qualities such as verification, authentication, cross checking, procuring evidence are going to be under considerable strain from the all-truth-is-subjective-and-people-must-make-up-their-minds school of thought. The trend I would suggest is already evident. In cri-cket for example it has taken months of persistent allegations, inquiry commissions, articles and actual evidence for a public consensus to build against the Indian selectors and on the question of whether cricketers participate in fixing matches. One would have thought that the overwhelming amount of data would have pointed the direction a long time ago.

Are people increasingly wary of reaching conclusions? I would say they are. And as our sources of information multiply, a shifting, flexible idea of truth is something we will have to deal with.