It is said to be the Dance of democracy. There are
various superlatives given to our elections. The whole process of election
makes the people feel powerful. All the so called powerful leaders will come
and ask for the common man’s vote. What they do with the vote is an entirely
different question. This time the social media is said to play a major role
The amount of
work these parties put into their online campaigning it would look like the
election is going to take place in Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg as the
electoral officer or that the election commission will consider the number of
retweets and favourites also along with the cast vote.
| Yes! XYZ Party gets more likes and hence we have a winner! |
My favourite social media of the lot is twitter. I
am pretty sure that the creators of twitter would have had one of those friends
who just won’t keep quiet. They must have come up with this brilliant idea
while talking to her/him.
Anyways you open twitter now and it is elections all
over. Full of trivia which no one really cares about. Major news handles trying
to outreach other major news handles by bringing exclusive items about
candidates' past and present. When they run out of such highly interesting
trivia I am half expecting these people will go to some astrologer to get
exclusive breaking news about the candidates’ future also. In fact that is a
good idea. Instead of having the experts and political commentators they should
have a panel of astrologers, psychics, tarot card readers, Paul the octopus (in
spirit of course, which I am sure can be arranged) and have a healthy
discussion on the future of the Indian democracy.
Now things like candidate A wore a t shirt last year in a function which proves him to be an agent of the West or candidate B wore a kurtha pyjama last month which made him regressive and against development are getting momentum in twitter! This will ensure a series of tweets making fun of the said candidates and hordes of people supporting candidates A, B and C, more or less making it a trend. They will have childish twitter fights on how childish it is to fight on twitter. They will profess great ideas about how the country should be run in 140 letters. I mean where did all those ignorant geeks go? What happened to all the good old days when Poonam Pandey could start a trend with a single tweet? (Now even she has to resort to the English premier league) Or how Koffee with karan used to trend with its sheer brilliance!
Every day at least two of the top trends now
are political in nature. This is setting a bad example to the upcoming
generation that wants to join twitter. For them it’ll be a choice between the politically
aware pseudo intellectuals of Twitter and the self obsessed ignorant teens and aunties
of Facebook. That’s worse than choosing between Modi and Rahul Gandhi.
I find solace in instagram now. Barring the selfie fever it is a wonderful social network to drool over the food you'll never eat and places you'll never visit.
The following are some of the statistics I found
while researching on this. (By research I meant Google. Isn't that kind of
obvious?)
India has
114.8 Million Facebook users (http://qz.com/150274/india-facebook/
)
33 Million Twitter users (http://www.alltechienews.com/posts/twitter-s-most-active-country-is-china
)
A total of 147.8 million users
We have 814 million eligible voters (http://blogs.reuters.com/india/2014/04/03/facts-and-figures-for-the-2014-general-election/)
We also have a population of around 400 million
without access to electricity (http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTENERGY2/0,,contentMDK:22855502~pagePK:210058~piPK:210062~theSitePK:4114200,00.html
)
Around 18 % of the voters are in the social media
but a staggering 49 % do not have access to electricity.
This 18% is
widely spread all over the country with probably a high density in the urban
areas.
Do we have to politicize the social media also for
this? Social networks are probably among the few places left where your religion,
location, cast, political leanings don’t really matter. Why not keep it that
way?
Do dance along for the democracy.
(Do share this with the pseudo intellectuals, ignorant
teens and Google employees)