From someone who would go into a temporary state of ‘rigor mortis’ whenever she was asked to set up a simple email account, my elder sister, a skilled physician, now talks about ischemic heart conditions and Google Buzz in the same breath.
My sister’s surprisingly brave foray into the world of social media tools set me thinking. How would someone like Mahatma Gandhi, the Father of India, also known for his aversion to technology, take to today’s Net-savvy environment? My sister turning a Nelson’s eye to social media till recently of course stemmed from her ‘late media adoption’ related fears. The belief that technology was used at the expense of the poor was of course the well documented reason for Gandhi’s aversion to it.
Every age has a symbolic raw material that defines its historical moment. In pre-independent India, it was Gandhi’s ‘Charkha’. In ours, it is social media.
Gandhi's movement to free India from British rule would have been impossible without the social media of his day- the newspapers. Had he been alive today, would Mahatma Gandhi, the Father of India, have embraced Facebook and Twitter?
Well let’s just hypothesize that Gandhi has a Facebook profile. Would his ‘status updates’, ‘links’ and ‘wall-to-walls’ have the same ability to stitch together all of the information he fed into it and weave a worldwide social networking revolution inspiring a passionate brand of pro-democratic ideals as his Charkha had done?
(Click on the snapshots below to view enlarged version)
With his ubiquitous presence on Facebook and Twitter, Gandhiji would be a pre-eminent steward of information, garnering multiple international voices of support for his non-violent fight for independence! Indeed his Satyagraha would have assumed new-age dimension and vigour, making it a monolithic activity, a kind that would spawn multiple blogs and discussions.
I sign out wondering, if only Gandhi knew of the magic of social media , would he have said more........ emphatically?
