JUST SPAMMING | Where Is This Digital Era Taking Us To?

A bizarre incident in Chennai last week made many sit up and raise a plethora of questions on the future of human society. The incident went like this: A 30-year-old man, designated as ‘social media influencer’ was arrested for abetting the suicide of another 27-year-old ‘influencer’ and YouTuber. We are not even told if both the men, the one who died of suicide at his home in Chennai, V Harish, and the other who reportedly drove him to suicide, Jason Samuel Vijayakumar, have ever met. But the police have arrested Vijayakumar after making a preliminary enquiry. Among the many questions that the episode raised, the first one is on how the police found prima facie evidence after the deceased person’s father filed a complaint against the accused?

It is learnt that Vijayakumar, the CEO of Zemuria Inc, has raised a spate of doubts over the credentials of Harish, the popular finance content creator, who had garnered over 13 lakh followers through his Instagram and YouTube accounts. In his suicide note, Harish said that his five years of work – he had built a social media brand called Finance with Harish - had been dismantled and that he faced severe mental stress. Vijayakumar claims that Harish lacked a proper regulatory credential like SEBI registered Investment Advisor to offer financial advice and that he had only pointed out that inadequacy in his social media posts. But Harish’s father, J Vinayagam, accuses Vijayakumar of making an attempt to extort Rs 3 crore from his son.

The other allegations are cyberbullying and harassment, which Vijayakumar has denied publicly. Is publicly revealing that someone offering advice on finance, which in common parlance means telling his 13 lakh followers how to invest their money wisely and get maximum rewards, does not have the required credentials – if that SEBI registration is mandatory for offering such advice – actually a wrong thing to do? Have we not seen charlatans being booked under various sections of the law in other fields like medicine, where men and women with no qualifications had been masquerading as qualified doctors and endangering the lives of unwary common people? Haven't those quacks been exposed by common people or qualified medical professionals?

Going by that logic, if Harish was indeed qualified to guide people on where to park their money, why should he be basically offended by allegations by someone like Vijayakumar and above all how that would have given him mental stress. After all, the internet, particularly the social media through which people like Harish and Vijayakumar operate or do business or earn popularity, has been a platform for many quacks and upstarts to earn money and credibility in recent years. We have seen the platform used even by politicians and political parties to peddle their views and even capture the imagination of people in recent times. In fact the amount of money and human resources spent on the so-called IT wings by political parties has been phenomenal of late. We have even watched political parties romping home in the elections only on the strength of their IT wings without much real ground level campaigning.

So, have we, as a society, moved into an era of digitization, where people can even be driven to commit suicide by social media? If we were to believe that the internet and social media call the final shots in business, profits, dignity, integrity, honour and all such things that human civilization had bequeathed us, have we not lost basic humanism in the process? When someone gives advice on finance to lakhs of people en masse and if someone comes around to tell the people not to take that advice and if that offends the one dispensing with advice – we don’t know if it was free or monetized, in the case of the latest incident – and drives him to suicide and if the police take cognizance of the suicide, the fear is that digital technology is likely to emerge as the arbitrator of human disputes, which could be dangerous trend.

With AI, the acronym for Artificial Intelligence that is more in currency than the expanded full form, already competing with human beings to take over jobs and mundane work, if we allow the internet and social media to deal with human emotions and feelings, there is a threat of humans turning into robots and society functioning as a factory assembly line. If we feel that the process has already started with computers, data and AI taking an upper hand in matters relating to politics, democracy and elections, it is time human beings take note of it and make efforts to reverse the trend. Because there should be no scope for machines and computers or even social media to interfere in the affairs of human beings.

Even the reported influence that social media has on entertainment by deciding the people’s watch list of cinema, television serials and OTT offerings should be curbed. It is indeed tragic that a new film is judged by the reactions it evokes on Instagram, reels, and WhatsApp groups these days. Critics point out that the prevailing trend has engendered a culture in which even avid film fans judge a movie without even watching it because they are often overwhelmed by the social media reactions as soon as the film is released. The worst is that social media reactions are engineered by vested interests and not artistically inclined connoisseurs.