“Bad information is cheap, good information is expensive.” This line made me stop and pause — it was such an obvious point, but I hadn’t really thought it through.
Let’s unpack this line by meeting six people. They’re all fictional. But it’s pretty likely that some of these people actually exist.
Lata
Lata is a 22-year-old woman who lives in a village in Saran district of Bihar. She hails from a very poor farming family and was married off in her teens into a family similar to hers in another village. She received indifferent primary school education and is literate — up to a point.
Five years ago, a woman like her might have had very little access to information. Today though, all Lata needs is a smartphone and a phone service with data. A second-hand smartphone comes for less than Rs 1,000 (or less than $14), and you can get data for free or close to free. This means she can access WhatsApp, Facebook and YouTube. She can get news, connect with her family and friends, and watch movies on the phone.
Lata doesn’t have her own phone though. She uses her husband’s phone when he’s home from work for a few days every 2-3 months. Otherwise, she shares a phone her parents-in-law. At her parents’ home there was a TV, but her husband’s family is worse off.
For the stuff that is central to her life — presumably information related to health, education, work prospects, government programs and so on — where does she get reliable information?
Rafi
How about Rafi? He’s a 29-year-old migrant worker at a textile factory in Tiruppur, near Coimbatore city in Tamil Nadu. Rafi is originally from Odisha. He works long, relentless hours at the factory and gets very little time off. He moved to Tiruppur for work after finishing 10th grade. He shares a two room rental with 4 other workers. Together, they have enough for a colour TV but his pride and joy is his 11,000 rupee smartphone, which he bought after 3 years of savings. Rafi speaks Odia and Hindi and has picked up Tamil and a bit of English.
Other than WhatsApp, where he is part of more than a dozen groups, his main source of news is the TV. Rafi has travelled extensively through small town India in search of work and is not easily fooled, but like anybody else, he is vulnerable to rumour, propaganda and ‘news’ that activates his grievances.
Asha
Asha is 21 years old. She lives in Chirag Dilli, a compact chawl in New Delhi with her parents. She was born in the big city. She went to a private school where she learned to read and write (but not speak) in English. She speaks Bengali and Hindi fluently. Her mother is a cook and her father a driver in Panchseel Park. They both work at posh homes. In 2018, Asha completed high school and caught a lucky break — she got into ITI, where she is learning her trade in architecture.
Asha has seen newspapers all her life, but she only reads them when she buys snacks from street vendors who package the food in newspaper pages. She is streetwise and knows about the dangers of fake news on the internet, and she is careful about which WhatsApp groups she is a part of.
Asha heard about the violence in Delhi in early 2020 but she is confused as to who is responsible. The police and the state say it’s the Muslims to blame, but her wide variety of friends are fiercely divided. She feels she ought to trust official channels, but there are enough people who tell her to think twice.
Mukesh
Mukesh is a 38-year-old man, born and bred in Borivali, Mumbai. His father was an engineer at Mahindra & Mahindra, and his mother a science teacher at the primary school that he went to. Growing up, he felt insecure about himself, which was partly brought on by a setback to his father’s career. His parents were forced to sell off a plot of land in Pune they bought in the 1980s to pay off some debts. They did manage to hold onto their two-bedroom flat and stabilise their earnings.
But the years of uncertainty made Mukesh chronically anxious, and he told himself repeatedly that he had to make it into engineering or medicine. When he was accepted at Bangalore Institute of Technology, he was over the moon. He now works in the software industry and lives in Electronics City, Bengaluru with his wife and two children.
Mukesh is a fiercely proud Indian and considers himself a nationalist. He has only started paying attention to the news in the last ten years, when the India Against Corruption movement kicked off. When he learnt words like ‘minority appeasement’ and ‘sickular’, he was filled with a sense of understanding and purpose.
Though he could get quality information, Mukesh prefers to keep himself in an echo chamber of news and views that are similar to his own.
Kishore
Kishore is a 16-year-old boy in Bangalore, studying at a top IB school. His father comes from a distinguished family of lawyers. His mother comes from a line of writers and academics.
From childhood, Kishore was encouraged to go where his heart and mind took him. His favourite subjects now are mathematics and psychology. In the last few months, he has been gripped by epistemology, or the study of how knowledge itself is produced. He volunteers at workshops for other children where they discuss how news, propaganda, scientific knowledge, and entertainment is produced. Nothing gets past him.
In this latest pursuit, he is being encouraged by his aunt, a tenured professor of epistemology at a prestigious humanities college in the United States. He is in the process of applying to several universities in the US.
Geeta
Geeta, 45, is Kishore’s beloved aunt. As a professor who is at the forefront of research on how knowledge is created, she sits on the board of several media literacy initiatives. Geeta’s husband Balasubramaniam owns an asset management firm in New York City. For twenty years straight, he has paid for a Bloomberg Terminal, which costs $24,000 per year in subscription. He has gotten very rich, partly because access to the Bloomberg Terminal — with its cutting edge information on markets — is rare.
Comparing the six
It is not very surprising that Lata and Rafi don’t have access to good quality information. They barely know what the internet is and are susceptible to misinformation and propaganda. They live hard lives and their fears can very easily by activated.
Compared to them, Asha has better access to good quality information. She also has a variety of friends who expose her to different views.
Mukesh has access to very good information but everything he does is dictated by his anxiety, and he prefers to read and view news, views and entertainment that come with clear cut answers and reassuring explanations (whether they are reliable or not).
Kishore has received the best education money can buy. He is surrounded by positive role models, who were themselves lucky enough not to be beaten down by life.
Good information is expensive
Everything else being equal, we need at least two things to live and breathe good quality information: financial and emotional stability. Just one of these is probably not going to be enough. Of the six people we just encountered, only two of them are lucky enough to have both: Kishore and his aunt Geeta. Even if both of Kishore’s parents lose their jobs, they have generational advantages. They also have a third advantage – a rare one – in that they are steeped in a field that pays attention to how we come to know what we know.
Mukesh is financially stable so long as he has a job, but he doesn’t have the resources to devote to his emotional needs. Asha is not secure financially, but she is better off emotionally. Her life is also on the upswing. Rafi is at the mercy of his circumstances. Lata has almost no agency.
How many of us are lucky enough to be either Kishore or Geeta? If I had to place myself in this spectrum, I would have probably be a step above Mukesh, both in terms of financial and emotional stability. I have shades of Kishore’s and Geeta’s privilege, but not their lives and comforts. I pay attention to the quality of information I get because that’s literally my job. Had I chosen any other career, this would not have been the case.
Where do you place yourself in this spectrum of people? Isn’t it crazy that we are all so vulnerable to misinformation, propaganda and polarisation?
Images courtesy: The Noun Project. ‘Lata’ is by Humberto Cesar Pornaro. The rest are by Yu luck.
Note: All the characters are fictional, but they are named for legendary Indian playback singers.
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