How We Describe The Problem Is Key To The Solution
'Fake news' is a hopelessly inaccurate term.
One of the features of good writing is that it doesn’t try too hard to impress. It consists of simple sentences and small words. And for fun, writers break this rule every now and then.
When you want to convey complex and sophisticated arguments, simple and precise words are best.
One of the sub-rules of good writing is: no more than one idea per sentence. And no more than one argument per paragraph.
I thought I would adapt that rule to videos. Whereas previously, my explanatory videos have tended to run into 7 or 9 minutes in length, I thought that I should try shorter ones. A 90-second long video or a one-minute video, during which I would present no more than one idea. I would also have a little bit of fun during the process and shoot those videos from different parks in the city that I live in — New Delhi.
I’m three videos into the series, and so far, it’s working out well.
Video 1: On the idea of ‘Info Independence’. From Rajdhani Nursery, Jor Bagh, New Delhi.
Watch on Instagram.
Shortened transcript:
How dependent are we on good quality information? For practically anything, we need good information. Questions such as:
What meal should we order on the app?
Which college should we go to?
Why career change should I think about?
Which political party should I vote for?
What do I think about climate change?
Which movie should I see next?
All of this is dependent on good quality information. And I thought on Independence Day, we should ask [ourselves], how information independent are we, really?
And I think it’s a good question to ask because we’re now in an era where our minds are being manipulated, our emotions are being controlled, and we’re each served a version of reality that is unique to us…thanks to the filters on our smartphones and echo chambers and so on.
So…how can we become information-independent?
Video 2: On our right to ‘clean information’. From Lodhi Gardens.
Watch on Instagram.
Shortened transcript:
Hi, I’m at Lodhi Gardens. It’s hot and humid but I don’t mind it because in the monsoon or summer the air is relatively clean in New Delhi…or as clean as it can be in any major Indian city.
Speaking of which, we speak about the ‘right to clean air’, and our ‘right to clean water’, but we don’t often talk about our right to ‘clean information’.
Why is that? Possible, because we don’t frame our information problem as one of information pollution.
At best, we use words like ‘fake news’ to describe our information ecosystem. But ‘fake news’ is inaccurate because we are implying that the problem is related to ‘fake’ and ‘news’.
Whereas in reality, information pollution comes from news, media, social media, WhatsApp, politics and society.
So using the term ‘fake news’ to describe the problem of information pollution is a bit like saying that in New Delhi, the air is polluted in the winter because a lot of people are lighting fires to keep themselves warm. Yes, that is true, but it’s only one of several reasons why the air is polluted.
So similarly, we should think of framing the problem as one of ‘information pollution’ and then we can talk about our right to clean information.
Video 3: How can one de-pollute information to make it clean? From Lodhi Gardens.
Watch on Instagram.
Shortened transcript:
In the last video, I spoke about how, just like clean water and clean air, we should have clean information as well. But how do we purify polluted information to get clean information?
There are two ways at least: verification and contextualisation.
1) By ‘verification’, I mean that all the information we get in our lives has to be checked once, twice, thrice for accuracy. We need to ask questions like, who prepared this piece of information? To whose gain and so on.
2) By ‘contexualisation’, I mean that all the information we get has to be presented in the right context. Even the truth (or facts) can be lost if it is not presented with the right context.
Here’s a thought: Just like we should all have clean drinking water in our homes but often don’t — we use Aquaguard or Kent or boil water — just like that, we should also have clean information in our lives.
But we cannot depend on anyone else to do that. We need to clean it ourselves. We need to de-pollute information ourselves.
And how do we do that? We’ll get into it in future episodes, but for the moment, thanks for watching.
Note: I published these videos with different aspect ratios and with different supers (labelling styles). I adhere to the old blogging ethic here, which says that it’s OK, and even desirable that you experiment in full public view. In this worldview, everything is in permanent beta mode.
I used three different phone-editing apps: iMovie, Clips and Splice. Suggestions are more than welcome!