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The Information Pandemic

Santosh Desai
16 August 2009, 05:39 PM IST

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The panic continues even though by now we have all been told many times over that the swine flu is a mild disease with a low rate of mortality. We have seen the evidence of other countries and heard the testimony of those who have been through it themselves. And we know that the number of fatalities nationally is currently lower than that from a bus rolling into a nullah, something that occurs every other day in the hills. The unfortunate truth is that the price of human lives is cheap in India and the death of a few dozen people in road accidents does not warrant a front page mention in most cases, unless of course a BMW or a film star is involved.

Some of the reasons for this continued fear are easy to come by. The epidemic could balloon into something much larger and given that there appears to be no vaccine on the horizon, this understandably breeds uncertainty. Also there is an element of randomness that makes anybody a potential victim and this is unnerving. The fact that it is transmitted by air makes us distrust what is otherwise the most natural and unconscious act we perform – that of breathing. Unlike some other public health tragedies that are linked to social and economic class and are thus seen as someone else’s problems, no such immunity is available here. And yet, in a country where every year dengue claims so many lives and yet the mosquito problem is treated with such indifference that the government has to plead with its citizen to perform simple acts of sanitation like cleaning air coolers in their own homes to keep mosquitoes away, it does seem odd that another disease should ignite this much fear.

Perhaps the real pandemic here is not the flu, but information. The pathology of information and its transmission makes for interesting study for it seems to follow a logic of its own. For instance, even when news channel go hoarse in pronouncing that H1N1 flu is mild and that no panic is necessary it seems to have the opposite effect. It is as if today’s information systems are wired in a way that panic is almost a necessary outcome of a situation like this. The reasons for this are many. Firstly the number of media channels has exploded as has competition within each medium. Each of these are now available 24X7 and are networked across the world. Information thus explodes at the speed of thought across these networks instantly and simultaneously. The desire to be first with the bigger news makes news channels subtly and not-so-subtly massage the news so as to amplify its news worthiness. Dengue is old news, swine flu is hot off the ovens. The medium is now programmed to create anxiety and produce a perpetual illusion about the momentous significance of all events. Usually, this means inflating trivial news or focusing on the antics of a reality show star but in a case like this the natural inclination of the medium finds full expression in an event tailor-made for anxiety and the inevitable panic follows. What the channel says is no longer important, what it inevitably transmits is anxiety. The viral nature of information transmission makes all events seem like pandemics.

The new information network re-shapes the way we experience the world. Media is the surrogate sky under which we lead our lives often unaware of its pervasive influence. We mistake stars on television for astral objects and believe that the horizon is only far as the number of channels on our television set. The new information order makes the discrete appear continuous by selectively aggregating information. We think of the flu epidemic as very serious but don’t really care about the Naxalite issue in spite of being told that their influence now extends to almost a quarter of Indian districts. In the mental map of the country drawn for us by media and aided and abetted by our own concerns, what happens in the ‘interiors’ is really not our concern. News about Naxalites does not spread like a virus because it does not sell for Naxalites however widespread their presence have not as yet become a virus that can attack the middle class immunity system.

The other distortion that we see occurring all the time to make the sparse and infrequent appear to be the recurrent dominant reality. Raj Thackeray’s protests or the pub attack in Mangalore are classic case in points where isolated incidents become disproportionately significant merely through the intensity with which they are covered. This is also works in making issues close to the heart of a few into national issues. The question of youth in politics is a prime example of a question irrelevant to most of India, that by virtue of incessant chatter forced its way into our consciousness, at least temporarily.

The way information flows across the world today is re-shaping our view of ourselves in ways we are not aware of. We are implicitly re-drawing the map of the world according to our interests, biases and vantage points. Information is getting re-sized, re-scaled and re-shaped for our consumption and for our apparent benefit. The flu scare might abate but the media enabled panic will certainly be seen again. We are moving into a world where soon we could create panic without any flu to ostensibly fuel it. How that’s for technology?

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