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Information revolution offers a chance for developing countries

— Photo: S. Thanthoni

EMERGING TREND: Sashi Kumar, chairman, Media Development Foundation, delivering a lecture in Chennai on Thursday.

CHENNAI: The information revolution spurred by apparently non-exploitative technologies affords developing countries such as India a great opportunity to bridge the divide with the developed nations, Sashi Kumar, chairman, Media Development Foundation, said on Thursday.

Delivering the third endowment lecture organised by Loyola College in memory of former Principal and educationist Jerome D’Souza, Mr. Sashi Kumar said the instruments of the information revolution, as opposed to the industrial revolution that created socio-economic chasms, precipitated a shift of the skills of workers from “brawn to brain.”

Giving his take on “the emerging media ecology and its implication for the public,” Mr. Sashi Kumar said the wondrous technology-premised world forecast in science fiction a few decades ago was unfolding in real life in the modern world, “right in front of the first generation of beneficiaries.” The way the new age technology-dictated lifestyles lent credence to postulates of “endism”—or the end of history the way we have known it—and, at the same time, symbolised a chance for countries such as India to make a fresh beginning, Mr. Sashi Kumar said.

Multimedia technologies were also redefining the dimensions of knowledge assimilation and making the theory of “flatism”—where the world is all surface and where height and depth are mere illusions—appear more real than speculative.

Another fallout of the new media ecosystem was the change in conventional concepts of the media, specifically its fundamental role of representing events. “Today, the representation is being taken as the reality itself,” Mr. Sashi Kumar said.

According Mr. Sashi Kumar, the shift from analog to digital technology had changed the whole media experience from that of a linear and sequential process to a multi-sensorial and “pixelated” appreciation. The volatile blend of the conventional montage and the new age collage created a multiplier effect in the cognition, experience and understanding of media reportage. For instance, a typical Bloomberg screenshot, with its diverse mix of a talking head, a live footage, a Sensex bar, “breaking news” scrolls and advertising pop-ups best illustrated this convergence of the montage and the collage.

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