Conversation

Srijit Kumar Bhadra

Edited 4 months ago

I am aware that feeling busy and being busy are not always the same thing. However, increase in the volume of interactions, can be perceived as an increase in busyness.

My conjecture is that people in my Indian society are more busy due to increased speed of peer-to-peer communication technologies, such as WhatsApp (and now Telegram Messenger), which has certainly changed the way we interact. I see that my friends, acquaintances and neighbors have became busier when Hotmail and Gmail became part of our daily life with respect to postal letters and PSTN based landline telephones with expensive subscriber trunk dialing. Now with low cost mobile calls across India and cheaper 4G/3G with WhatsApp and other social media, people have become even more busier.

WhatsApp’s and, now, Telegram Messenger’s popularity in India, with its large user base of more than 500 million and 100 million active users respectively, have made it a powerful tool for spreading not just information, leading to busyness, but also dissemination of misinformation and propaganda. WhatsApp, Facebook, Telegram Messenger etc. may have played a significant role in shaping societal dynamics in India, and there are concerns about the impact such instant messenger tools have had on the fault-lines within Indian society. The situation can get worse with the advent of Generative AI driven misinformation.

The next level of busyness and social dynamics will arrive when augmented reality based P2P chat platforms become a commodity.

Reference:

  1. Encrypted Messaging Applications and Political Messaging: How They Work and Why Understanding Them is Important for Combating Global Disinformation
  2. Govt may force WhatsApp to remove ‘end-to-end encryption’: What this means for users
  3. Deepfakes To Disinformation: Year 2023 Brought A New Era Of Digital Deception, Driven By AI
  4. Governance: Ethics, Artificial Intelligence, and Politics

#Mastindians #MastIndia #India #Transparency #Disinformation #Misinformation #Ethics

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