Fractured/Earth

Last week, Frontline hosted a discussion between Pankaj Sekhsaria and me about the Great Nicobar project. Here is a video.

You know the backstory to this. As I have written last month — and several others have before me — Great Nicobar is being flipped from an island untouched by modernity to a resource frontier.

It was a fun discussion. Much of government policy would be a laughing stock if not for secrecy and the veneer of authority. In this discussion, we looked at the project from first principles and eyerolling followed — as it was bound to. What sort of a half-wit proposes coral reef relocation? Or casinos around a defence base? Or mega infrastructures in a seismic zone?

PS: The report got published. I posted it on social media (twitter, in my case) and stepped back to see the report’s journey into the world. Hardly any traction. After a week of promotions, the report has been received less than 100 retweets. It makes one pause. Ours is a time of marginalisation. Great Nicobar (to say nothing of the government’s larger plans for Andaman and Nicobar) have not received due attention from legacy newsrooms. As for the independent portals, their capacity to get the word out is limited by both social media algorithms and their own paywalls.

There are hard questions here. How do we spread the word about our reports if the social media platforms discriminate against news links? How does one respond to this marginalisation within the discourse? And then, there is access to information. While I wouldn’t have seen Gazans’ reality if not for social media, there is too much misinformation/disinformation + echo chambers here.

I am mulishly unwilling to switch to another social media platform. It takes long to build a following + the same faultiness of algos and echo chambers exist there as well. Maybe the answer is to go old-fashioned, focus on the work, and leave amplification to the readers. But readers are changing too. People are reading less; consuming more video which, however, is not great at getting details out plus there is shitloads of video out there. On the whole, I have to rethink both my consumption and propagation of news.

For now, I think, I will decouple from wretched, ugly twitter and refocus more on the good newspapers and websites that still exist. On amplification too, I think, I have to hope that good reporting will travel on its own.