This is also hilarious when you look at two tweets or facebook posts where the person lauds something in one and criticises it in the other. Or someone tweets that they are very against people who do something, then later do that very same thing.
It would be even more hilarious if it wasn't a serious problem. Along with fake news, this kind of hypocrisy among people we trust for our information and politicians who rule us is worrying. Not only do they lie, they also change tunes seemingly at will. And why has this come to the fore now? Why have people started spreading more lies and changing their tunes more frequently recently.
My humble submission and pet theory is that they haven't. I think politicians and media-persons are as unscrupulous and hypocritical as ever, it's just that with social media, it is far easier to spot as well as far easier to spread information across so many channels. It's like the Chinese whispering game - you hear one bit of information at one end and the information the last person receives is something only mildly related, most often completely random.
But more than this, I would quote Arsene Wenger here. "It’s difficult sometimes when you are paid to talk, to talk, to talk and only say things that are true and intelligent." When someone's job is to talk a lot, give speeches, moderate panels every single night, they very very quickly run out of intelligent things to say. The hundreds and thousands of contradictions and hypocrisies in their mind and action come to the fore - and I'm sure this would be true for every single one of us. Even us good conscientious citizens, if we gave vent to every single thought, would be seen as terrible hypocrites. And maybe this is why some very questionable characters have huge mass followings - I think human beings are by nature very comfortable with hypocrisy. If we weren't, we would never be comfortable with anybody on this planet. All public figures, to my mind, are by definition questionable characters.
Social media exacerbates the situation is two ways. It makes it so much easier to point these hypocrisies out, because there is a record of every video, every statement, every speech, every tweet that someone has made. And secondly, everyone who loves to talk and say a lot is given a voice to talk all the time. This information deluge leaves us exhausted and often extremely sad or pessimistic.
I have lived happily all my life in Bengaluru. But when I was young, reading the newspaper was really scary. And after a burglary at my house, I started paying special attention to the crime section. Every day there were a couple of murders, a person shooting someone else, chain-snatchings, etc. etc. Now I understand that Bengaluru is a really peaceful city. More than a crore people live there, you would expect way more crime, chaos and disorder. If this was a few hundred years back, maybe a desperate fight for food, water and resources would cause riots and mob violence everyday if those many people lived in such a small space. So I now appreciate that the city of Bengaluru is overall, a peaceful, not terribly unsafe place. At least for the vast majority of the city for the vast majority of people.
And this is why I sympathise with Brandon Stark. (Mild spoilers from Game of Thrones coming) He is always expressionless, brooding, sad and sombre. Here is a guy who knows practically everything that has ever happened. All the major and so many minor events of history. Here is a guy who at any time can tune into anything happening anywhere and just find out. This guy is living in the biggest possible information deluge. Of course he would be terribly sad all the time.
And how different is this from us. Any semi-major event happening anywhere on earth, we can always find someone making a Facebook live about it. We can find someone tweeting about it. It is a miracle we are all not like Bran. Because at some level, we don't like to believe all those on media.
As one of my favourite contemporary writers Manu Joseph said - "The elite, by their very nature, are few in number but exert a disproportionate influence on voters by controlling activism and influencing journalism through which they then transmit gloom and fear. Their greatest political success is in creating the notion that we are going through times that are dark, angry and insane, which are intrinsic qualities of social activists but not the nature of our age or the world at all. The world is mostly banal and hopeful, until it switches on the media."
I like being banal and hopeful.
Social media exacerbates the situation is two ways. It makes it so much easier to point these hypocrisies out, because there is a record of every video, every statement, every speech, every tweet that someone has made. And secondly, everyone who loves to talk and say a lot is given a voice to talk all the time. This information deluge leaves us exhausted and often extremely sad or pessimistic.
I have lived happily all my life in Bengaluru. But when I was young, reading the newspaper was really scary. And after a burglary at my house, I started paying special attention to the crime section. Every day there were a couple of murders, a person shooting someone else, chain-snatchings, etc. etc. Now I understand that Bengaluru is a really peaceful city. More than a crore people live there, you would expect way more crime, chaos and disorder. If this was a few hundred years back, maybe a desperate fight for food, water and resources would cause riots and mob violence everyday if those many people lived in such a small space. So I now appreciate that the city of Bengaluru is overall, a peaceful, not terribly unsafe place. At least for the vast majority of the city for the vast majority of people.
And this is why I sympathise with Brandon Stark. (Mild spoilers from Game of Thrones coming) He is always expressionless, brooding, sad and sombre. Here is a guy who knows practically everything that has ever happened. All the major and so many minor events of history. Here is a guy who at any time can tune into anything happening anywhere and just find out. This guy is living in the biggest possible information deluge. Of course he would be terribly sad all the time.
And how different is this from us. Any semi-major event happening anywhere on earth, we can always find someone making a Facebook live about it. We can find someone tweeting about it. It is a miracle we are all not like Bran. Because at some level, we don't like to believe all those on media.
As one of my favourite contemporary writers Manu Joseph said - "The elite, by their very nature, are few in number but exert a disproportionate influence on voters by controlling activism and influencing journalism through which they then transmit gloom and fear. Their greatest political success is in creating the notion that we are going through times that are dark, angry and insane, which are intrinsic qualities of social activists but not the nature of our age or the world at all. The world is mostly banal and hopeful, until it switches on the media."
I like being banal and hopeful.
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