Daily Times

Technological advancements have altered the architecture of human societies for a long time. Each new technological leapfrog had massive impact on the politics, sociology, and economy of human societies, the way of living, and relations of power and production.

Pankaj Mishra, who is the leading original thinker in India, has recently written in Economic Times. India Times.com about the spread of smart phones and its impact on Indian democracy and we refer to his write-up in this article. Just as writers in the early 20th century were interested to find out about the impact of industrialization and mass democracy and its interaction with the new technologies of the time such as the telephone and telegraph; writers like Mishra are interested in how the smartphones are changing the social and political fabric of countries like India.

Smartphone is not a neutral technology. It has been appropriated by the political and social forces to mould behaviour and influence elections. It is naïve to believe that the technologies that spread faster communication will lead to more freedom and democracy in modern times. In the era of instant communication, it is often difficult for passive end-users to distinguish between the truth and fake news. Such manipulated text and images spread through WhatsApp and Facebook have already led to lynch mob violence in India, and it can influence the results of Indian general elections, just as it did in the Brazilian elections last year, and the US elections in 2016.

The bigger issue in today’s world is that powerful countries and powerful forces and institutions within the countries benefit from the manipulation of technologies such as the smartphone and nudging millions of people’s behaviour in a certain way to achieve their objectives

World powers are interested in influencing elections in the countries of their interest. We have seen the US and the West using all sorts of techniques from closed-door arms twisting to waging wars to achieve regime changes in developing countries. We have seen Russia aggressively using its intelligence-based ‘psychological operations’ and manipulation of information and technology to achieve the desired election results in countries of Eastern Europe, and even in the US. Russia is a ‘textbook’ authoritarian state, an offspring of Marxist ideas misapplied in the form of the USSR. However, the Western countries that claim to be democratic and transparent use equally dirty techniques to achieve results, they want in other countries’ elections.

We have seen in the case of Cambridge Analytica, a private company, that had in the past links with the trans-Atlantic defence establishment to make ‘psychographic profiles’ of millions of users on Facebook as discussed in these pages earlier. As per the Guardian, voters’ behaviour was influenced through fake news, rumours and disinformation by Cambridge Analytica manipulation of social media users.

Election manipulation by modern technology and disinformation goes back to the “nudge theory” of behavioural economics and psychology. It scientifically studies the ways people’s behaviour can be influenced or “nudged” without them even being conscious of it. According to Wikipedia, “nudge is a concept in behavioural science, political theory and behavioural economics which proposes positive reinforcement and indirect suggestions as ways to influence the behaviour and decision making of groups or individuals”.

According to Mishra, in modern elections, politics is blended with entertainment and it gives advantage to demagogic leaders like Narendra Modi to use social media to their advantage as both the campaign commercials and film videos are disseminated through screens of smartphones. India has 400 million smartphone users, a figure that has quadrupled since 2014. According to the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA)’s figures, Pakistan has 159 mobile phone users, out of which 66 million subscribe to 3G/4G services, presumably on their smartphones. Similar blend of fake news and manipulation is perhaps also done in Pakistan through social media dissemination by using smartphone technology.

Unlike in countries like Bangladesh where the sitting government used strong-arm tactics to target the opposition and influence the recent election results; democracies are being changed in other countries in the world by using the “nudge theory” to influence the behaviour of voters through disinformation, manipulation and fake news. It is as applicable to countries like India as it is to the US. According to Mishra: “With potentially active citizens turned into passive consumers with diminished attention spans, buttons on voting machines tend to be pressed in the same depoliticized spirit that the ‘like’ icon is clicked on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter”. Such manipulation through technology has massively reversed the progress achieved on the basis of rationality in countries like India.

Smartphone, a latest technology, is in surreal ways is nudging hundreds of millions of people’s behaviour in this “new magico-mythical age” and doing away with the gains made through critical thinking by replacing the age of writing with image making and passive consumption. A new “alternate reality” is being constituted through such systematic and manufactured manipulation of images spread through smartphone technology.

Every new generation worked hard to find ways to overcome the negative impact of the new technologies. When non-standard texts were spread in the societies by misusing the new advent of printing press in the past, the rational forces in those societies found ways to overcome the challenge. The bigger issue in today’s world is that powerful countries and powerful forces and institutions within the countries benefit from the manipulation of technologies such as the smartphone and nudging millions of people’s behaviour in a certain way to achieve their objectives. Non-partisan, intellectual, and integrity-promoting social groups need to rise to the challenge and analyze this phenomenon and find ways to overcome it.

The writer is an Islamabad-based social scientist