This is a weird post - to write it is to go against what I want to say. Much like the saying “Modesty is a strange thing, the moment you say you have it, you have lost it.”
We are living in a world of information and technology (I&T) abundance. And it is only going to grow, seemingly with no discerning end. Any end, I think, would be abrupt and absolute, meaning we would almost go back to no technology, as most apocalyptic movies predict. Anyway, this I&T has changed life in many and complex ways which we will keep discovering as we go along (and that would require a separate blog post). Now and here, I plan to discuss something specific. I&T abundance has made ours a world of pseudo experts. Till almost two decades ago, words like expert, intellectual, genius were used sparingly and with carefully. But nowadays these tend to be thrown around nonchalantly. And that is because lines of differentiation have become thin and blurred. Technology was always supposed to be a great leveller, the most democratic ‘thing’, if ever. And indeed it has been so so far.
This is all hazy and nebulous. Let me start new paragraph and clarify with examples. Till some time back, there were tomes like Britannica Encyclopedia, and Tell me Why. These were essentially general knowledge books offering some information on a wide range of topics. These were almost like status symbols because having them was a sign of intellectual inclination (and wealth also). So they would adorn the mantelpieces of a particular gentry - the corporate or IAS types, those who put knowledge above all virtues (or at least pretended to). Having read these books meant that one could talk with reasonable confidence on most things under the sun. These books apart, most houses with school-going kid would have an atlas, a Manorama Yearbook, and a dictionary. All these are now examples of a bygone era, one in which I grew up. An era in which information was at premium. So if one had to do a school project on tribes in India, one went to the market to buy a book on that topic. But if one wanted to know about tribes in Australia, one would have to go to a library, and a good one at that. Information was not easily available (apart from things like Country-Capital, country-currency, books-authors, country-flags, things I used to enjoy memorising).
This was a world before Wikipedia and Google. Since the advent of these two, things have changed dramatically. When I first heard about Wikipedia, I wondered how much of information can it have? And almost dismissed its potency. Is it possible to even conceive all kinds of information? As it turned out, while it may be difficult to put a number to all possible kinds/forms/quantity of information, it is certainly possible to keep a central repository which can be expanded continuously. And this repository is so humongous that it can answer most questions - Encyclopedia has stopped to matter long ago. Now one can not only get the entire list of Country-Capitals readily at one place, one can read the geography, history and what-not about the country and capital. So while I had to spend many hours to mug up this list in Class 2 almost three decades back, ask a kid today and he can look it up online and tell instantly. It has almost become irrelevant to memorise this information. By extension, it has become irrelevant to have any ‘general knowledge’.
All this can be jarring for somebody who has painstakingly collected trivia all his life and who is ready with discourse on most things, to be easily matched by someone with a fast internet connection on his mobile. It almost undermines a virtue. It seems unfair. And what I am saying is applicable not just to trivia or general knowledge but to many fields. Another which comes to mind is - playback singing. Here too technology has made big changes. Indian movies contain songs which are not sung by the screen performers themselves. They are sung by artists with good voice, called playback singers. Till a decade back, a playback singer would sing the song in a studio with entire music, chorus, and orchestra, just as it would play out in the movie. So a song of 4-5 minutes would be enacted, requiring perfect coordination of the entire team. If the playback singer made a mistake or somebody in the orchestra missed the beat, the entire team would be rewound to the last correct part and restarted. But now, technology has allowed the entire song to not be broken into smaller, manageable fragments. Not only are the music and vocal separable, but each of the component is further broken. The music is broken to the last note and vocals to the last letter. Say if you have to sing “Every night in my dream, I see you, I feel you”, you can sing almost each phrase separately and the best renditions of each phrase can be joined. The music can be filled in separately. If there are more than one singer, each can sing her part separately which too can be joined later. The rigour of timing and coordination can be dispensed with. All this means that it is easier to be a reasonable playback singer now than it was some time back. This is not to say that one does not need a good voice, practise and skill. Just that perfection is not as tough as it was before. A ready example was when a poor voice like me recorded a song for my wedding. I had sung in phrases and the best renditions were assembled, with a better singer pitching in some gaps. I did not have the skill to sing even one line in one go with correct intonation and modulation but I came across looking at least average. Lack of technology in the past meant much greater skill was required and thus the genius was truer.
Similar democratisation is being seen across many disciplines say in writing, photography etc. About writing, my blog is an example. Writing can almost be a basic human urge like speaking. I am sure personal writing has been in practise since writing was invented, in the form of a diary possibly. But now blogs allow people to write openly, something which till a few decades was a domain only for those with some writing skills. Not just blogs, Facebook and Linkedin are flooded with people penning their thoughts in paragraphs, open letters, sermons in seemingly profound manner. A rubbish writer like me can now harbour a delusion. Similarly, the cameras and mobile phones of today have so many settings and combinations that it is much easier for anybody to come across as a reasonable photographer. Not just that, after clicking a photograph, it can be edited extensively to look much better than the original. So if the sky in the background is not the perfect colour, or if the lighting on the faces is not great, no issue! This is a far cry from when people would spend time learning the ropes of photography and wait for hours to construct a photo with ideal background and lighting. Softwares now make people look much better in photograph then they actually are, again something which I too have benefited from. Marriage albums are so fake nowadays.
Now that I have laid down the minefield of my central premise, let me tip-toe around it a bit. First up, I do not mean to sound elitist. I am not unequivocally saying that it is wrong to improve accessibility to any field, to allow more people to experience these. I agree that no field is one person’s preserve. What I am essentially saying that greater democratisation has taken away the essence or diluted the vigour of the field, or corrupted it. There is a sponging off of what was beautiful about the field in the first place. A discipline is called such for a reason - it requires patience, natural gift or willingness to acquire the skill, courage, mental toughness. But now it is easy to access a discipline without having any discipline.
But the biggest problem of this trend for me is that diminishing appreciation of the true form among the masses. Getting a huge lift-off from the technology, people sense that they have achieved mastery over a field. As a corollary, there is limited humility to accept that what they exercise is the sanitised, comforted version of the same, built up on the pioneering work of others. Thus there is limited respect of those who practice a discipline in its purest form. If anything, on seeing a master, people look to find the shortcuts with which they can claim bragging rights, and nothing else.
I think the true practitioners of any field would be the one feeling most irritated. They are the ones who put in all the effort, only to be shown off by an amateur wannabe. I get some taste of it when someone who barely has any understanding of a sport which I religiously follow starts to talk like an expert merely by throwing up the day’s newspaper. Most people today act like pseudo experts on having bought off the shelf a crash course on any discipline. And they live under the delusion, ignorance and arrogance of having experienced something, which in its true form, is beyond their reach.
But, and this is my second argument, I am sure the real practitioners are not too perturbed. Because they know that what most commoners are able to do is not the truth but just a popular, pulpy version of it. The true form still is reserved for those deserving of it. The real deal still has a value, it still commands premium. To turn around some of the examples I have quoted above, while Wikipedia can give you all the information in the world, it is no library. It gives data, but not knowledge, which requires analysis, or the ability to spot trends and linkage between unrelated topics. Or in real life situations, only genuine knowledge may save the day. I may write any number of blogs, I cannot get anybody to read it, any publisher to publish it, and no critic to even bother to tear it apart. While I may be able to click those sunset or beach photographs and also beautify them later on my laptop, it would not give me the eye and the heart to be able to tell a story with a photograph, to capture something more than the sum of its parts. The fact is that somebody like me cannot even write, and most wannabes do not even know what a discipline stands for. We just know a superficial version of it. But the true practitioners are not breaking any sweat because they do not care. They know that what they know is not petty, it is above comparisons. True art only seeks practise, and dedicated following, not mastery, and definitely not one-up-man-ship.
While I have rambled a lot, a dialogue in the movie Good Will Hunting captures the sense better - Sean says to the arrogant and wayward genius Will: “So if I asked you about art you could give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo? You know a lot about him I bet. Life's work, criticisms, political aspirations. But you couldn't tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You've never stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling….. If I asked you about war you could refer me to a bevy of fictional and non-fictional material, but you've never been in one. You've never held your best friend's head in your lap and watched him draw his last breath, looking to you for help..... I look at you and I don't see an intelligent confident man, I don't see a peer, and I don't see my equal.” Despite my caveat, I come across as an elitist. This is not because I excel in any field but because I revere those who do. And I feel they have a rightful place and an attempt to usurp that position through shortcuts is just vulgar. In a way, what I say sounds a bit classist, and with wide implications. It means that some areas are the reserve of some people only, but not because of any preordained entitlement, rather because of meritocratic arguments.
The way I read it, the last decade has seen an increasing angst against this view, both politically and socially. This has been the decade of the non-intellectual, who has risen to challenge the intellectual authority of the few. True intellect would always be a domain of the few. Agreeably, the intellectual can become arrogant, non-sensitive and non-empathetic on many occasions which arouses such reaction. Life is not all about arts, romances, and intellect. Those outside the clique now want to ram the door down. Those below want always to say to those above - “you may be smartest, most creative, most contributing to advancement of the human race, but so what?” The basic argument is to give greater fairness to life and world, notwithstanding the differences in skills or talent. This is essentially a utopian thought - some will remain above and some will remain below. What will change will be the measures of superiority - whether it is intellectual prowess, artistic abilities or muscle, money, and sheer scale. So where does that leave us? Either both parties course correct which is difficult as is. Or we end up destroying the social order. It is like saying there should not be anybody with greater access to anything. That everything should be equally allocated.
This post is a work in progress
