The Hyper-real Voter

“Why did you say I am a marine biologist? You know I always wanted to pretend to be an architect.”

-    George Costanzas

Sometime around 1998, I was introduced to Yahoo Chat by a colleague. For hours on end, we chatted with young virtual women our age, from different parts of the world. Since we were rich successful merchant bankers, we had absolutely no way of knowing whether these lines of text responding to us were really women or even young. Luckily, I didn’t have internet at home, or else I would definitely have been addicted. But this colleague had a VSNL connection. So, he often fell in love with unseen people and loved them through words typed out on a keyboard. He told us stories about these girls who were his lovers, and it gave him an odd confidence in his virtual self – a confidence that he otherwise hid conspicuously in everyday life.

My more intimate relationship with virtual reality began when I got Hotmail. I wrote long, involved mails to friends and then logged on every hour to see if they had replied. I had a relationship with the sound of a dial-up connection. I learnt to recognise from the notations of that tinny, scratchy high-pitched wail, whether the connection would fail or succeed. I guess, everyone from my generation had learnt that rough music.

Of course, email was different from chat. Here you actually had a real connection with the person you were writing to. Yet, the email created a second layer, a different textual relationship, whose syntax introduced a certain schizophrenia in one’s connection with others. In fact, the writing down of this relationship became the absent subtext of the text of everyday spoken interactions. It was, at once, hidden as it was acknowledged as an intrusion within corporeal relationships.

Then came SMSes. I was not among those who preferred to text than talk. But, most of those I knew, did. Talking was too much of a commitment. It meant an interaction whose time was not in your control. Texting afforded that control and distance. It introduced an entire new chronology in the act of a conversation. Text – pause – reply text – pause – reply text – long pause – what next? Each side controls how much to say, when to say, and when to end a conversation. It is disembodied and devoid of emotion or inflection. Hence, the introduction of emoticons. Today, even I carry out long conversations in SMSes – conversations that could span several hours or even days. New messaging apps allow us to experience these automatically as conversations even when they are spread over a long period of time. It has changed the way in which we perceive the unfolding of conversational time.

Each of these forms of virtual conversations has given us – quite literally – textual identities, textual personas. The most extreme form of this, of course, is social media. Facebook is a prime example. It appeals to certain characteristic elements of the isolationalist individual – exhibitionism and voyeurism. Exhibitionism because, these are my friends, here is what I do, this is where I have been, this is what I like, this is what I share. This is me at Face value. And, voyeurism because, I can, quietly, without being caught, go through the profiles of my friends, track them, without having to really interact with them, know what their families look like, where they have been, what clothes they want me to see them in. In other words, Facebook allows me to tell the world that I am what I want you to see me as. It is the principles of marketing brought to bear on everyday interpersonal relations. It also lets me decide who I really want to be known to be friends with, to measure people through the friends they have added in the virtual world.  

Then there is the equally revolutionary weapon of hyper-realism – Twitter. Twitter allows people to regurgitate, in 65 words, things they have picked up from the news media and pass them off as their own opinions. In fact, Twitter manages to turn opinions into facts. (Modi has caused massive development in Gujarat, Rahul Gandhi is a moron). It is a macho space where anonymity allows people to drop all norms of polite conversation. It is a space where soundbite style opinions rule and therefore – much like talk TV – opinions have to be aggressive and provocative and inherently banal. The real complexity of things cannot ever be captured in the number of characters Twitter allows. It accelerates the process of 'dumbing-down' that TV news introduced in everyday discourse.

Twitter also establishes a new hierarchy of the flow of ideas – from the followed to the followers. Yet, the thought-leaders in the hyper-real world of Twitter are themselves prisoners of this hierarchy. Because of its apparent democratic nature (interactive=democratic), the mobocracy of followers imposes upon the followed a populist pressure to deliver what they want. It is a self-enclosed world of mirrors where soundbites are reflected back at each other till they congeal and become facts.

Today, we are faced with an epidemic of the hyper-real. It is the primary mode of ideological existence of a large part of our young. And, thanks to cheap faux-smart phones, it has penetrated deep into the interiors of our country. It has created a new identity politics – the virtual identities of hyper-reality. It has created a community of young individuals who operate in a schizoid world – one foot in the lived reality of caste, class and community and the other in the lived hyper-reality of Facebook, Whatsapp & Twitter. It has created a schizoid political world where the traditional pulls of party politics and local power-relations are accompanied by contrary pulls of the Internet mob.

These people make up a large chunk of our first-time voters. And, whichever layer of their schizophrenic existence overdetermines the other, may well decide whether Narendrabhai will actually become the Prime Minister of India.