 "A different kind of freedom")
As India exults in the Supreme Court’s decision to scrap Section 66A, two pieces of online material, wholly dissimilar and yet very much interrelated have gone viral on the Internet last week.
The first - a story of how a world of strangers conspired to make the birthday of a Canadian teen with Asperger's syndrome, the most extraordinary one he’s possibly had. When none of his friends from Peterborough, Ontario, RSVP’d to a party invitation, Melissa Camus, mother of Odin took to the Internet, asking the members of her Facebook group to text her son a birthday message.
What happened next couldn’t have been imagined. A #odinbirthday hashtag quietly went viral and 4,000 messages poured in for the teenager, including from Toronto’s major sports teams. Nearly 500 strangers joined the birthday boy for a party at the town's local bowling alley, showering him with gifts and love they needn’t frankly have parted with.
Camus’ story did a great deal to reinforce one’s belief in the inherent goodness of humanity. It also bore evidence to the Internet’s amazing power to build an emotional connect between strangers.
The second bit of material, on the other hand, defiled this syrupy tale of online compassion almost at once.
Monica Lewinsky, ‘infamous’ still over 15 years after the scandal of her affair with former US President Bill Clinton rocked White House, in a powerful talk at a TED event in Vancouver sought to “recontextualise” her piercing experiences of being the object of a vicious worldwide public shaming campaign, amply aided by the very organism that showed Odin birthday love - the Internet.
“Cruelty to others is nothing new, but online, technologically enhanced shaming is amplified, uncontained, and permanently accessible. The echo of embarrassment used to extend only as far as your family, village, school or community, but now it's the online community too” observed the newly self-assured and persuasiveLewinsky. “A marketplace has emerged where public humiliation is a commodity and shame is an industry."
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Lewinsky would know!
But neither the deluge of hate directed at her, nor the outpouring of kindness towards Odin Camus, are new phenomenon. We've all experienced both, in gentler proportions, at different points in time. What is recent however, and in a sense the core message in both these stories, is technology's incredible ability to 'amplify', 'enhance' and make 'permanently accessible', both shame as well as sympathy.
The latter, we could do with in copious amounts, but is available in scant proportion to the former, online. The World Wide Web has more than ever before, empowered the court of public opinion to indict, debase, harangue and abuse, often with complete impunity. It has, with its sheer intractability, rendered irrelevant any intellectual debate between absolutists and pacifists about freedom and responsibility. On the internet, it is a free for all. Period.
What this means unhappily is this - over 50% of youth in India have been bullied online. It means one in four college going women has been harassed, resulting in heightened chances of depression. It means we now have officially reported cases of suicide over Facebook persecution. It means India now ranks third in the countries affected by this problem.
Freedom for some has evidently become torment for others on the Internet.
Which is frightening. Perennially connected, our existence today is more and more a macrocosm of the small, confined lives we once led. That means we are exposed to dangers that are bigger than those we’ve ever encountered before. Have we worried enough about whether our laws are tough enough to deal with this problem?
The abolition of Section 66A may well have given us all the freedom we desired, to have a free reign in cyberspace - and to be fair the judgment does seek more precision in defining what were nebulous sections about restrictions on freedom of speech. But the champions of free speech also now need spare a bit of their activism to push for freedom from online harassment.
Cyber crime - of all varieties - is now a raging global debate, and it is time India too begins seriously, to deliberate on why our persistent advocacy for online freedom of speech isn’t matched with as fiery a campaign against cyber vilification.
A good beginning to that debate would be to first recognise that there isn’t an inherent contradiction between the two. And importantly, as pointed out by this newspaper, examine carefully, if in doing away with a draconian, controversial law like Section 66A, we’ve also lost legal recourse to redress cyber bullying.