I started writing political posts on Facebook in late 2013. Those were the days when Tahrir Square, Occupy Wall Street, 15-M and the Indignados in Spain captured popular imagination and Social Media was hyped as this revolutionary breakthrough which would transform the world much like Gutenberg's Printing Press did centuries back. Closer home, AAP came out of nowhere to win the Delhi elections seemingly only on the back of its Social Media Campaigns (Its only later I realised that wasn’t the case). There seemed to be possibilities in using Social Media to spread political awareness, engage in interesting political debates and connect with people with similar views.
The added advantage was people actually seemed to be reading what you were writing and going by the likes and shares, enjoying it. For anyone who had ever written a blog before that, unless you were a celebrity writer, no one would ever read your blog. And on Facebook you were getting hundreds of likes, shares and comments on posts where you were just ranting out your frustration about a regressive Govt which had come to power. The dopamine kick from those likes and shares and new virtual “progressive” friends you were making while losing friends in the physical world who had suddenly taken to proudly flaunting their bigotry and stupidity, made Social Media a very addictive place.
Over time I came to realise that the dynamics of Social Media is such that it encourages ranting and the most banal political debates. Its not about the people who are on it, though that too is a factor as everyone reading a Wikipedia article or following a Twitter hashtag now thinks they are experts on all kinds of things. That along with the narcissistic tendencies the platform encourages where people feel the need to engage in performative virtue signalling and demonstrating ideological purity which costs nothing since there is no need to actually engage with people on the ground. But more importantly, the medium is such that it rewards you for writing short, reflexive posts which are your stream of thoughts say while you are pooping rather than writing a well researched, nuanced post on a complex subject. So, you get into this bad habit of writing short rant type posts even on topics which you have researched and want to present a nuanced position.
These issues were plainly visible during the recent events on Afghanistan. Everyone “had” to take a position on it whether they understood the complexities of the situation or for that matter Afghanistan’s history or not. And since most didn’t, they just parroted the Western and Indian press’ view that catastrophe had befallen the country due to the Taliban kicking out the US backed Afghan puppet regime. This line had the added advantage of virtue signalling your absolute concern and dedication for women’s rights. That this line of argument effectively gives a pass to the brutal US invasion and mass killings of Afghans and essentially parrots US talking points of justifying the invasion on grounds of women’s liberation while the US bombs resulted in more than 100,000 women and their children getting killed were of no concern to these Social Media warriors who, btw, included among them a woman politburo member of a well known Communist party in India. “Possibilities of Marxian Feminism under the cluster bombs of B-52 bombers” - that’s quite a woke sounding seminar topic, isn’t it? When confronted with this logic they would point out that they weren’t supporting the US invasion but independent progressive forces like the Mujaheddin warlord Ahmad Massoud’ son and the CIA spy Amrullah Saleh! You get the point - meaningless, nonsensical debates and whataboutry.
Besides these issues, the platforms have become echo chambers where your posts are only read by people with similar views and increasingly the platforms are censuring posts and accounts which are politically inconvenient to the ruling party - leaving you totally at their mercy. Also, they have severe limitations like it is very difficult to go back and search a post you have written, say, a year back.
All these things take me to the title of my post - Back to the Blog. Its time to go back to blogging! I will still continue to troll people on Facebook - for all its faults its still an excellent platform for that :). And I will post links to my blog articles on Facebook to popularize my blog. But this pretentious sounding blog will become the repository of my thoughts from now. Hey when you start something, you might as well be ambitious in your goals :).
Anyway, please do subscribe to my blog and better yet join substack and start your own blog.
লেখা শুরু করুন কমরেড, অপেক্ষায় আছি।