A Digital Demos
Sanjana Hattotuwa-February 24, 2018, 7:04 pm
A dozen years ago, Sri Lanka was a very different place. I was frustrated with mainstream media’s inability and unwillingness to report on the worsening situation in the North and East. The country was in the throes of a humanitarian emergency. The ceasefire agreement had broken down. We didn’t realise and could never guess then what was to come in 2009, but in 2006, the signs were evident we were heading back to war. In November, I published the first article on a web-based platform I created to bear witness to vital accounts no one else would touch, report or focus on. It was a situation report from Vakarai, noting that about twenty-five thousand civilians in the region, close to Batticaloa, needed food, medicines, shelter, water and sanitation facilities urgently. This wasn’t the kind of update newspapers at the time, in any language, carried.
A month later, my son was born.
Since then, I have nurtured two children. One, a physical being not unlike any other child and the required parenting, not unlike what fatherhood usually entails. The other, an unprecedented virtual construct and space. I was new to both roles, but with parenting a child, guidance and advice was more readily available. In creating a pioneering citizen journalism platform, there wasn’t really anyone I could turn to. No one had attempted anything of the sort in the country. This was a time predating social media, so there were no comparable examples, even from the region. Facebook was two years old and still strictly limited to alumni of Universities in the US. WhatsApp and Instagram hadn’t yet been invented. There were no smartphones, and feature-phones were all the rage – with the most rudimentary, largely text based mobile web browsing that took an eternity to render on small, low resolution screens. Many still used dial-up to connect to the web, since broadband (ADSL connections) had only been introduced around three years ago.
I stumbled my way through care-giving for two infants. My progeny aside, the online platform’s timbre, curation and execution – even if it were to fail – needed to set the bar for others to start from. If it was worth doing, it needed to be done well. Ultimately, the platform turned out to be quite resilient even when confronted with my own maddening myopia. In the second half of 2009, guided – nay, blinded - by a desire to bear witness to the horrible, inhuman conditions in what was then the largest Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp in the world called Menik Farm, I offered as a prize what was at the time a coveted handheld high-definition video camera to anyone who could send me footage of daily strife and life within its confines. The sheer violence of the request and endeavour, putting at grave risk those already suffering so much, I soon came to realise. Disgraced and ridiculed, my best intentions resulted in the platform taking such a reputational hit, it had nearly to shut down. My son has his mother to protect him from my well-intentioned blunders. There was nothing to inoculate the web platform from the founder’s failings. So I learnt as I went along. What kept me going was a belief in technology’s ability to bear witness to what many others in or with power, sought to deny, decry and destroy.
The platform is now what it is and many things to many people. Through dozen years of managing it every single day without any break, some insights into the flow and nature of online conversations are worth sharing. Nothing goes up on the platform without approval, from original content to comments. This means the worst diatribes and hate, in fact, often directed against the Rajapaksas, never go up. Civility matters, and in creating a safe space for principled disagreement to flourish, community and conversation were enriched. Counter-intuitively, the worst hate faced by site and self came post-war, through comments against the Muslim community and those who were seen to be partial to them, at the height of the BBS violence across the country leading up to Aluthgama in 2014. Commentary and conversation on the platform itself has declined significantly in the past three years. On the other hand, engagement, sharing and readership over social media have grown astronomically and without pause. Technology has played a key role in gathering, shaping, producing and delivering stories. At a time when journalists were being abducted, tortured, murdered, silenced and forced into exile, the platform continued its operations and featured what few others dared to focus on or frame, because the platform was designed to be irrepressible even in an austere, censorious context.
That said, technology itself wasn’t and must never be the end goal. The people and stories were. Communicating realities out of sight, out of mind to many outside the North and East, as well as, post-war, stories from the South rarely covered by mainstream media is extremely tough, because the attention economy is getting harder to capture and retain.
A younger demographic who grew up with social media and the web click, flick and swipe their way through content at a pace that is both disturbing and challenging – the first because one wonders whether despite the sheer volume of content consumed, an entire generation knows and cares far less about the world they live in, and the second because a publisher has to compete with cute cats to place on record stories of far greater value.
It is easy to demonise and devalue what one does not fully understand. Despite recent media headlines and developments, I retain hope through years of direct observation that politics, rights and democracy do matter to a younger generation and that their negotiation of the world, though on the surface cosmetic, is moderated in more complex ways. Friends, peers, social structures, groups and even sometimes the device, platform and app shape worldviews today in ways traditional media hasn’t fully grasped, at least in Sri Lanka. The ability to be agile in the development of content allowed the platform to reach out to and engage with audiences otherwise alienated by other media. We hacked their attention with content that shed light on country and context. Today, I am repeatedly confronted with young adults who say that as undergraduates or A/L students, they learnt often for the first time about things even their parents didn’t know or talk about through the platform I created in 2006. That ages me greatly, but more seriously, is also quite refreshing to hear.
I am now moving on. The best time to give up a good thing is when it is at the peak of its health. The platform is now in the hands of two gifted, young individuals who often speak to each other in a language replete with acronyms, memes, GIFs and hashtags even I don’t comprehend. At the same time, they are both committed to the same values the platform was founded on, and has all these years, championed. They are not alone. For all the hand-wringing and despair of commentators and parents around wasted youth fuelled by social media, these very platforms are now the bedrock of our democracy. It is here Sri Lanka’s future is increasingly farmed, forged and fought. It is here new ideas take root and germinate. True, social media is violent, sexist, patriarchal, misogynistic and often brings out the worst in us by highlighting the worst amongst us. But there is so much more that is positive, helpful, insightful and hopeful. One just has to go beyond headlines.
There’s a lesson there for others in the media, too often engaged in a race to the bottom by comparing numbers, readers and other metrics to the detriment of what journalism is at its core about – the transport of readers to issues they didn’t know they would be interested in, till they encountered it in an immersive, compelling way. My son, precisely the same age as the platform I created, is a digital native – as interested in physical books as he is in virtual content, navigating vibrant Viber groups with as much ease as he interacts with people in person. This is the future. This is our future. Rather than simplistically or disastrously seek to intervene, censor and control, parents and politicians need to focus on ways the best of us and the best in us can be inspired, guided and framed in ways old media, conventional journalists and conservative minds could never even begin to imagine.
I have been part of these discussions for as long as I can remember. I suspect I will continue to be, for many years to come.
