New Year Musings

“As I turn the calendar to 2009, I put big question marks after terms like globalisation, capitalism and the world order in general in the backdrop of the scale of manufactured violence around the world.” I have quoted these words from an email from a friend of mine on the first day of the New Year. He was very pessimistic about any hope of change where the “language of force and violence is the only language the world has always understood and respected.” What he is driving home is that there is no scope for optimism as power politics and not social justice is the name of the game in our world. He referred to, among other developments, the killing of hundreds of people including civilians in the aerial attacks on Gaza by Israel. 

I was initially not sure how to respond to the mail and end it on a positive note. We humans have a tendency to hate the present and glorify the past. And it is not very easy to convince my friend that he was portraying his age in darker colours than it really deserved. I just replied to him that I am an optimist and that I don’t subscribe to the negative portrayal of the world.

Why? I feel luckier  to be living today than 50 years ago or 100 years ago when there were more bloodshed, cold-blooded executions without any due process, wars, conflicts, violence, gender discrimination and colour discrimination, apartheid and colonial aggression of worst kinds. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and democratic institutions have changed our lives the way our ancestors could not have imagined. Harvard Professor Steven Pinker, who is currently studying history of violence, says that probably we are living in the happiest and the most peaceful times in the history of our planet because the scale of conflicts and violence in contemporary world, deplorable as they are, is negligibly minimal when compared to bloodshed and cruelty in the past.

The greatest achievement of our time that has changed the way we live is the Internet and an array of new media it has brought about. The Internet, as we all know, is an openly accessible system that can evolve its standards and allow anyone who can use it the way he or she wants to use it. The Internet, more than any other human achievements, has led to the evolution of what is called an 'open information ecology', a permission-free world which denies the existence of national boundaries. As Jonathan Zittrain says in his book The Future of the Internet, the success of the Net-based new media and networks is largely because of the underlying generative technology of the Internet. It is not an innovation-stifling technology. Despite their potential for abuse, the new media and networks satisfy our democratic urge for access to information and freedom of expression that are fundamental human rights.


On several occasions, China has blocked access to Wikipedia and YouTube. Iran has also made attempts to control its citizens' access to the Internet and blocked access to online content that it sees as anti-Islamic. But people in these countries find ways to overcome Internet censorship.
Contrast the idea of Internet censorship with what Jimbo Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, has set as the principle that drives the popular online encyclopaedia. He envisages a "world where every single person is given free access to the sum of knowledge." An important characteristic of Wikipedia, for example, is that thousands of volunteers from across the world come together and share information. The rules of what is acceptable and what is not acceptable in Wikipedia have emerged from the community of Wikipedians. Wikipedia, like other Web-based mediums, thrives on the culture of debate and discussion.

The participatory model of the Web-based mediums and networks encourages dialogue and not dogma. Unlike the conventional mediums such as the newspaper, television and the radio which presuppose a passive consumers, the online social networks and mediums serve little purpose if they do not have consumers who are actively participant.

So let me hail 2009.