What happens when the sound sense is out and the sound bite is in? When there is a rise of visual and fall of a word? When media content encourages unintelligent and idiosyncratic responses? When content is dumbed down to become popular?
It leads to a dumbing down syndrome as critical thought dwindles and people start enjoying the empty stuff. In fact, social media has ‘helped’ turning thinking human into mechanical mediocre who drowns in the tide and loves living in a senseless world. Such is its influence on contemporary life that it has created a new epistemology. Social media’s epistemology is getting defined by its overriding feature of ‘visual’—it’s for our vision more so than any other human sense. We see sequences of random, incoherent images accompanied with though-terminating clichés called ‘lyrics’ or medley of Bollywood comic antics and fusion music that serve up nothing other than silly entertainment. And most of us like such content to the hilt. From so-called influencers to pundits, people shower applause ad nauseam. This stands as the classical example of any society suffering from Dumbing Down Syndrome.
Is dumbing down just accidental? Is it an anomaly? A kind of intellectual inertia? No, never. This syndrome is a reflection of a particular condition in any society where endless ‘media mediocrity’, that people routinely overlook, becomes a benchmark of quality! Of course, there are factors that impact or promote this condition. The overall societal health, from its unstable politics to a mutating social framework, is reasonably instrumental in shaping this condition. At times, dumbing down is viciously pursued to preserve a particular socio-political order to contain people by their engagement with senseless hilarity. And then, the exterior influences of global media content creation and consumption trends also do play a part.
An American media theorist Neil Postman in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985) talks about the intrusion of telegraph and television in people’s lives; drawing a parallel between Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and the contemporary world where public discourse is dead as we are losing our deliberative culture, and instead getting obsessed with trivia and nonsense. Currently, replicating the telegraph and television with Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, the public discourse seems turning essentially both rambling and redundant. Club it with content created under different genres of sloppy entertainment like comedy, roast, slapstick, parody, pun and rap …blah blah.
In Kashmir, over a few years, lots of youngsters are trying various forms to express themselves, especially through social media modes while adapting to the new digital technologies. From vlogs to rap numbers, the creative industry is apparently resurging out of experimenting with the newer nuances of expression. However, unlike Muneem of band Alif or rapper Roushan Illahi aka MC Kash and a very few others—the gifted envoys of a generation that grew under the shadow of gun and gloom—many others jumping the fray are dumbing us down to low-grade stuff. If professionals amidst a lot of hardships and challenges have created a niche for themselves and struggled to bring acceptance to such creative work, the non-professionals should not traduce the whole cultural industry with their raw efforts and slapdash antics. In a way, they pander to the unseemly taste of the audience by producing content that is far off the mark. That’s why, we see a torrent of hits and shares online!
For any creative work, people involved ought to be educated or aware of their history, besides being conscious about the dynamics of the place they belong to. Serious sensitivities cannot be laughed off, distorted and trivialized under the garb of comedy or humor. It aids in benumbing critical thinking as the content lacks the gravitas for sober analysis or reflection. And importantly, those who review such stuff need to be responsible while heaping praises over such ‘content creators’. We can’t afford to be cognitive paralytics and the contributors to the making of dystopias. It will be criminal on our part.
Moreover, such a trend is likely to have a harmful impact on the anxious youth whose worldview is already confounded and trampled by the uncertain surroundings around them. Kashmir, right now, cannot afford to lose its youth to things like drug abuse, vulgarity and agnostic pleasures. Content like this is just an add-on to the fiasco. God save us before we are dumb out-and-out!