Social media has impacted modern writing and trained youngsters to pen their point of view precisely. Authors tell Shrabasti Mallik that social networking has worked miracles for Urdu
If you have trained yourself to express your thoughts in limited 140 characters (on Twitter), then you definitely will be at some advantage than the rest when it comes to writing a book. Social media has been criticised no ends for various reasons but there’s an advantage that most of us ignore. Authors say that social media not only has helped us learn how to express ourselves precisely, it also gives us an easy access to popular opinion, something which is essential for writers.
Shashi Tharoor says that social media has generated conventions in the air, opening new genres — short stories in 140 characters. “At the end the purpose of a story is to get your imagination to provoke another’s imagination,” he says.
At a time where we are always pressed for time and still have an indomitable urge to make ourselves heard, social media comes to rescue. “We live in the era of the instant and social media captures our shortening attention span perfectly. We are constantly devising quicker ways of expressing ourselves,” says Tharoor, who is considered as one of the first Indian politician to own a Twitter account and use it personally.
He further explains that it is because of our shortening attention span that we tend to blend words and phrases of two or more languages in social media. “I have been active on social media and I have seen how the form of expression has changed — from long elaborate sentences to a few words. It has also influenced the way authors write,” he adds.
“Social media is also the platform where we see different languages merging together and not as badly as we imagine,” says Ashok Vajpayee, well-known Hindi poet, “Though it is nothing new, such has been the case since the time language was introduced. Even in regular day conversation we do not stick to one language. A simple sentence like ‘Main andar aaya, palang pe kameez rakhi, khirki kholi, TV chalaya aur akash ki taraf dekha,’ has an Urdu word kameez, English word TV and a Sanskrit word akash.”
Content on social media is also unedited and that also accounts for the development of the language. Author Pankaj Dubey says, “The lack of censorship has given people the liberty to express themselves in any way they want. And with the right to speak there is the right to not hear what the person has to say. I know many people who wrote good blogs and publishers contacted them for their good writing. Social media is a tool with which you can take a book and produce it on a mobile phone, there is no advertising required.”
When there is freedom of expression, there is also a chance of being judged on what you express. According to Vajpayee, judging other people is a contentious act. “You do not have the moral stature to judge someone else. Nobody writes like Tolstory or Rushdie now, so we have to be respectful of what others write,” he points out. Every single post on a social media is a call for debate and arguments.
“Our conversations have changed, the ways we interact have changed but human niceties should remain. Nobody should claim that theirs is the only truth,” says Vajpayee. Tharoor adds, “The alchemic concoction of anonymity and the freedom of expression make it possible for even the most polite of people to be aggressive, on topics that they neither understand nor are interested in.
Social media has created a vast network of isolated yet connected individuals who wake up at the onset of a bad post or a wrong comment to wreck havoc. One of the biggest strength of social media is that it is an interactive medium — a place where you have the right to ask questions and demand answers. But one does not need to pay heed to everything that is written. It is not a broadcast medium. I like to think of social media as a vast public square where you bump into all kinds of people. There is no need to get upset over minor quarrels.”
Nidheesh Tyagi, a web journalist, points out that social media to Indians is not new. He explains how in the early years a dhobi would trigger a conversation within the society which then would go on to the extent that an agni-pariksha was called for. He feels that social media is more a boon than curse for many reasons — it is one of the easiest way to search for information.
Social media uses language which is very simplified as it is supposed to be understandable to the masses, but a few writers argue that such a language can never become the part of literature.