Media Buddhi: Recent Episodes

View Details

One paragraph each from three books that I’ve been reading. What’s not to like about that, I thought. And so I decided to plunge headlong into the world of Substack Video by reading out one paragraph — no more — from each of the three books.

I hope your mind feels quieter after watching or reading this. The first paragraph is Learning from Silence: Lessons from More Than 100 Retreats by Pico Iyer.

“A monk is at heart the ultimate man of the world. That’s where his sense of kindness and self-sacrifice is most needed, and it’s to those in trouble that he must attend. He may deepen his commitment in private, but it’s the streets that he has to reap the blessings of his practice.”

I chose this paragraph because there is a temptation to believe that monk is someone who withdraws from society, and I was reminded by Iyer that this is not true at all.

The second paragraph is from In a Flight of Starlings: The Wonder of Complex Systems by Giorgio Parisi. He is a Nobel Prize winner in physics but he writes in very clear prose.

“This…is the scientist’s calling: to imagine or to do what no one has done before. But we cannot spend our lives attempting to open locked doors that no one has a key to. Before beginning, it is crucial to understand whether or not we have the competence, technical skill, and tools that will allow us to accomplish the job. Even then, nobody has any guarantee of success.”

Parisi is the best of the best, and yet here he is, asking us to be careful before taking moonshots. He finishes the paragraph with this line, “We to have throw ourselves headlong into the task and aim high. Still, if the target is so high we have no chance of reaching it, then it’s better not to begin.”

The third paragraph I want to share is from What Ten Young Men Did, a coming-of-age novel. It’s a translation of a Sanskrit classic from the 7th century C.E. called the Dasakumaracharita by Dandin. The thought I’m sharing from this book actually comes from a small introduction to Sanskrit in the beginning of the book. Isabelle Onians, the translator, writes that Sanskrit literature is full of puns or wordplay. Here’s more from her:

“Classic Sanskrit literature can abound in puns (slesha). Such paronomasia, or wordplay, is raised to a high art; rarely is it a cliche. Multiple meanings merge into a single word or phrase. Most common are pairs of meanings, but as many as ten separate meanings are attested.”

I first saw this book at the wonderful Albert Bender Room at the Green Library at Stanford University. Among all the Latin and Greek classics, there was an entire shelf of the Clay Sanskrit Library, and I chose this book to read. I sat in a deep and comfortable armchair and read for about 10 minutes. It put me to sleep. When I awakened some 15 minutes later, I replaced the book and went home. But the charm of Dandin’s masterpiece stayed with me, and I bought a personal copy.

That was in 2019. Since then, I’ve been reading a little here and there. It has proved to be utterly charming.

And so, let me round off with an example of the wordplay. She quotes the following line

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mediabuddhi.substack.com

View Details

As digital investigators, fact-checkers are forced to look at the small picture, magnifying glass in hand. We zoom in so much—to work out if something is manipulated or not—that we might as well be looking at pixels and 1s and 0s.

But what happens when you zoom out and look at the big picture? What does our work through 2022, all 1135 fact-checks, reveal about ‘fake news’ in India?

Here at BOOM, we crunched the data and munched on the numbers, and then we spat out an annual report. (In this endeavour, our tool of choice wasn’t any statistical toot but the humble spreadsheet.) But what should we read into the report? And what do those graphs mean?

And what does it mean when we say that:

• Muslims were the biggest targets of false claims in India, but also the BJP and Narendra Modi.

• The misinformation landscape and the model for analysing them here needs to be different from the approach that works in the West.

• BOOM does not favour any particular party.

• We cannot fact-check everything because not everything is fact-checkable.

• Muslims and Hindus were both targeted, but in different ways.

• Most of the 76 media misreporting incidents of 2022 were based on stoking communal tensions.

This special episode of Media Buddhi A-Z is for all those who want to dig into the misinformation/disinformation ecosystem in India. The report and this podcast is a good start. If you want to look at our data, please get in touch with us.

In the episode:

Jency Jacob - Managing Editor, BOOMDebraj Sarkar - Senior Researcher, BOOMArchis Chowdhury - Senior Correspondent, BOOMDivya Chandra — Producer, Workshops and TrainingH R Venkatesh - Director, Training and Research

As always, thanks for listening.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mediabuddhi.substack.com

View Details

How should we refer to the problem of information overload? Should we take a health ‘frame’ and speak of ‘information pollution’? We talk through various options. We also have our second guest on the podcast! Sophie Zhang, a former Facebook employee who turned into a whistleblower talks, us through the term IT Cell: what it means, why living in a world governed by them is dangerous, and how to recognise them.

We round up the episode with a brief reference to two more words starting with I: Identity and Intersectionality.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mediabuddhi.substack.com

View Details

We have our first guest on the show today! Dr Ritumbra Manuvie at University College Groningen, who is also a founder of The London Story, a nonprofit that monitors disinformation and hate speech in India.

The story of how she came to speak to us is so…Twitter, where she disagreed with a video we put out advocating for the use of extreme speech over hate speech.

After a back and forth on Twitter, we decided we should invite her to the podcast and explain the difference between dangerous speech, extreme speech, and hate speech.

Other than hate speech, we also tackle homophobia and ask the question, is homosexual a neutral term? (It is not.) We also talk about horse-trading and how that’s a unique phenomenon related to Indian politics.

References

Book: Read This to Get Smarter: About Race, Class, Gender, Disability, and More by Blair Imani.

Dr Ritumbra Manuvie’s work with the University of Groningen and the nonprofit she founded The London Story.

Book: Social Media and Hate by Shakuntala Banaji and Ramnath Bhat (free to download)

The Rabat Plan of Action on the prohibition of advocacy of national, racial or religious.

What qualifies as hate speech? F.A.Q. on Hatebase.org.

Did you like this episode? One way in which you can support us is by sharing this episode on whichever platform you wish. Thank you.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mediabuddhi.substack.com

View Details

In this episode, we discuss the following ‘G’ words: Gender, Gaslighting, Gatekeeping and Grassroots.

• Why Gender, Sex, Sexuality are often confused with each other, and why all three are not binaries. Rather, they’re a spectrum.

• What is a Grassroots campaign and how is it different from an Astroturf campaign in the world of politics, society, culture and justice.

• Gaslighting: What it is, and what exactly is political gaslighting.

• Gatekeeping: When is Gatekeeping a good thing and when it is not.

References:

Book: Read This to Get Smarter: About Race, Class, Gender, Disability, and More by Blair Imani

Article: How politicians manipulate us- Media Buddhi

Did you like this episode? One way in which you can support us is by sharing this episode on whichever platform you wish. Thank you.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mediabuddhi.substack.com

View Details

In Episode 7 of the podcast, we discuss ‘F’ terms.

• Why Fake news is such a terrible term and what’s the difference between fact and truth.

• Why the run out of England cricketer Charlie Dean by Deepti Sharma gives us two examples of Framing the debate i.e. getting it right.

• Feminism isn’t just for women alone (in case you didn’t know it).

• Is there a difference between far-right and far-left? And what about fascism, fringe elements, and AntiFa?

In the next episode, we tackle the letter ‘G’. Do write into us to suggest words and topics to tackle and corrections, if any.

Did you enjoy listening to the episode? One way in which you can support us is by sharing this episode on whichever platform you wish. Thank you.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mediabuddhi.substack.com

View Details

In Episode 6 of the podcast, we discuss four ‘E’ terms and words: equity-diversity-inclusion, ethics, extreme speech, and eve-teasing.
We talk about the subtle-but-important difference between equality and equity.

The nuances between what is and what is not inclusion.

Are ethics a matter following the rules or looking at the context or both? How are ethics in journalism different from the ethics of fact-checking?

Why a deep form of subjectivity is sometimes the best kind of objectivity.

Why the term extreme speech is better than hate speech. And why it may be time to stop using the term toxic masculinity and use another term.

What is the problem with the term eve teasing? What is difference between sexual harassment, sexual abuse, and sexual assault?

In the next episode, we tackle the letter ‘F’. Do write into us to suggest words and topics to tackle and corrections, if any.

Did you enjoy listening to the episode? One way in which you can support us is by sharing this episode on whichever platform you wish. Thank you.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mediabuddhi.substack.com

View Details

In this, Episode 5 of the podcast, we examine five ‘D’ terms: disinformation, decisions, demographic anxiety, decolonising our minds, and dog whistling.

We talk about the daily decisions we make (some 35,000 of them) and why that makes us susceptible to disinformation.

We discuss why disinformation related to the Muslim population of India is so effective when targeted at Hindus.

We look at how the legitimate exercise of decolonising our history has been mixed up with the dangerous project of rewriting our history.

We also ask whether India is now past dog-whistle politics, given that we now seem to have open calls for violent action.

As always, do get in touch with us if you want us to discuss new words. In the next episode, we tackle the letter ‘E’.

Did you enjoy listening to the episode? Consider subscribing for free to receive new episodes and support our work.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mediabuddhi.substack.com

View Details

While preparing for Episode 4 of Media Buddhi A-Z, we discovered that the term ‘cancel culture’ is a favoured term for people who identify with issues on the right.

So in this episode then, we examine whether people like author J K Rowling and editor-politician M J Akbar are really cancelled. Because they still seem to have access to large platforms.

It turns out that cancellation is different when viewed through the lens of ‘punching up’ and ‘punching down’. Listen on for more on that.

We also discuss other terms and people such as:

Manufactured Cancellation
Boycott Culture
Cognitive Bias
Confirmation Bias
Chilling Effect
Cheap Fakes
Crony Capitalism
Conspiracy Theories
Cishet

References

Harper’s Letter with 150+ signatories, A letter on justice and open debate

The rebuttal to the letter above with 160+ signatories, A more specific letter on justice and open debate

What is the chilling effect? An article on Media Buddhi

Book: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Are you Spock or Homer Simpson? An article on Media Buddhi

Book:Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

Book: The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

LGBTQIA+ Media Reference Guide [pdf]

Thanks for listening to the podcast and reading Media Buddhi! Subscribe to receive new episodes and support our work.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mediabuddhi.substack.com

View Details

Welcome to a special episode of Media Buddhi A-Z. This is a short episode in which I talk more about the need for this podcast, why it’s a podcast in the first place, and not a video-podcast or for that matter a series of articles.

My name is H R Venkatesh, and I’ve been with BOOM Fact-Check for about 3 years now and I started Media Buddhi.

I’m actually recording this back at home in New Delhi after having landed from a series of international flights, but this episode was written on those flights in the last two weeks. Basically, three of us at BOOM Fact-Check went to Oslo, Norway for Global Fact 9. It’s a fact-checking conference and we encountered some pretty interesting new ideas and we confirmed some of our own ideas about how to tackle the war on truth. And hopefully, when I said ‘confirm’ our views, hopefully there wasn’t must Confirmation Bias at play!

Then, from there, I went to Honolulu, Hawaii, for another conference, the International Media Conference by the EastWest Center, where I encountered a few more interesting ideas. Unfortunately, I caught a moderate case of Covid-19 in between and I was forced to rest there and in New York where I had to cancel a flight.

But the experience also gave me some time and space to think—away from the regular rhythms of work and life, and I’m passing some of those thoughts to you, because they’re focused on why we’re doing this podcast.

So in my first few days in Honolulu, where I was self-isolating from other people, but not necessarily stuck to my room—the University of Honolulu campus is beautiful with large canopy-like trees—I came across a book in their campus bookstore. It was half-open, they were re-organising their stuff, and I came across this book, it’s called, Call Them By Their True Names, by the writer and thinker Rebecca Solnit. It was this solitary little red book that was nestling in a stack and priced at $1, and of course, I grabbed it before anyone could see it.

Now for those of you who don’t know Media Buddhi very well, Rebecca Solnit is like a patron saint, and I think I’ve unconsciously absorbed her writings over the years, such that it led to the creation of this podcast even.

So…why this podcast? The ideas was that we must have the space to discuss truly contentious issues by taking them one word at a time. In each episode, we tackle some words starting with one letter of the alphabet. For the first episode, for the letter A, we discussed words like Authenticity, Algorithm, Appropriation, Allyship, Anonymous, and Anxiety. Some of these words seem very simple, but they are actually nuanced, and understanding them better helps us have better conversations.

For the next episode, devoted to the letter B, we discussed words like Bhakt, Bias, B**t or Bakwas, and Blame and more.

Now back to the book, Call Them By Their True Names by Rebecca Solnit. When I read the first few pages of her book, sitting on a bench under another large canopy tree at the University of Hawaii, I felt shockwaves. I felt like she was describing the project of this very podcast, far more eloquently, and of course, many years before we started it.

I’m going to read a few parts of this book now.

Solnit says that one of the types of stories that turn up in our folklore or myths again and again is how a mysterious or threatening person is defeated when the hero or heroine discovers his name… I’m reading verbatim from her now.

“In the deep past, people knew names had power. Some still do. Calling things by their true names cuts through the lies that excuse, buffer, muddle, disguise, avoid, or encourage inaction, indifference, obliviousness. It’s not all there is to change in the world, but it’s a key step.”

She continues:

“When the subject is grim. I think of the act of naming a diagnosis. Though not all diagnosed diseases are curable, once you know what you’re facing, you’re far better equipped to know what you can do about it. Research, support, and effective treatment, as well as possibly redefining the disease and what it means, can proceed from the first step. Once you name a disorder, you may be able to connect to the community afflicted with it, or build one. And sometimes what’s diagnosed can be cured.”

It’s just amazing that Rebecca Solnit writes these words, and she says further down in the passage,

“Naming is the first step in the process of liberation.”

I like this part: the idea of naming as a diagnosis. And naming as the first step in the process of liberation.

Think about it, words and terms like fake news were not common at all before 2016. Same with words like misinformation and disinformation — these words were used in intelligence circles and in spy novels, but they were not really mainstream. Similarly, we have so many words today that describe feelings and phenomena where there were no words before. Feminism is one, for example.

Once we got to know these words, we could start building actions and we started fact-checking for example, which is a field that pretty much sprung up overnight. That’s what I think she means when she says naming is the first step in the process of liberation.

Let me quote one last time from her:

“To name something truly is to lay bare what may be brutal or corrupt—or important or possible—and key to the work of changing the world is changing the story, the names, and inventing or popularizing new names and terms and phrases. The project of liberation has also involved coining new terms or bringing terms that were obscure into more popular use: we now talk about normalization, extractivism, unburnable carbon, about walking while Black, gaslighting, the prison-industrial complex and the new Jim Crow, affirmative consent, cisgender, concern trolling, whataboutism, the Mano sphere, and so much more.”

Now these words that we will discuss in future episodes and in the Indian context as well, there are many words that need proper explaining and examination and there are many words that need to be created, or reclaimed.

I’ll give you one more example: at the conference in Honolulu, my fellow panelists was Dr Joan Donovan, who is the Research Director at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University. Coincidentally, she was also at the fact-checking conference in Oslo, and she made a couple of eye-popping presentations. And I was able to grab little bits of conversation with her here and there. She said, think of the terror of the word hacking…the idea that people can take over your electronic devices and steal your passwords and plant bits of incriminating evidence in your laptops. Dr Joan Donovan says, hacking gave way to a global effort called cyber security, which is probably an industry worth billions of dollars.

Similarly, what can misinformation and disinformation lead to? Can the rise of polarisation, misinformation and disinformation give rise to a global effort other than fact-checking? We already have fact-checking. You know maybe media literacy at the scale of journalism, or something else that we can begin to imagine as we go about the business of naming, or coming to terms with new words. Stay tuned as we find out.

There’s one last thing to say.

Why are we doing this as a podcast? Because a podcast is a conversation, and in conversations you are allowed to develop your ideas in real-time and you are allowed to make mistakes and backtrack…to an extent that you cannot do either in text or video.
A podcast is also a very intimate experience, because it’s like we are talking directly to you. When it’s a video, we know that it’s playing on a tab or an app on a device somewhere, there are multiple distractions, so that isn’t optimum.

Finally, you can do other things while listening to the podcast. You can listen to it with 60% concentration or for that matter at 2x the speed, or faster.

That’s basically it. I’m missing my colleagues Divya Chandra and Archis Chowdhury but we will all be back for the next episode.

Thanks for listening.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mediabuddhi.substack.com

View Details

In this, Episode 2 of the podcast, we examine six words starting with the letter ‘B’: Bakwas (b**t), Bhakt, Backfire Effect, Blame, Bias and Big Lie. For each word, we provide examples and talk about why there are contentious. In some cases, we simply explain the terms and think about how they are used in the public sphere.

Here are some questions, asked and answered.

Is bakwas or b*t* a legitimate word? How does it differ from lies? We also ask whether it is important to distinguish between bakwas and lies (hint: it isn’t, so long as we learn to understand the difference).

Is a Bhakt the same as a Sanghi? Is it a derogatory term or a label worn proudly? What Dr. B R Ambedkar had to say about being a bhakt.

Why couldn’t Stanford psychology professor Jennifer L. Eberhardt distinguish between white faces as a kid and what does that say about bias?

Is ‘minority appeasement’ a big lie?

Trivia

Who wrote this about Jawaharlal Nehru in 1937?

“Jawaharlal cannot become a fascist. Yet he has all the makings of a dictator in him — a vast popularity, a strong will directed to a well-defined purpose, energy, pride, organisational capacity, ability, hardness, and, with all his love of the crowd, an intolerance of others and a certain contempt for the weak and the inefficient.”

The answer: Nehru himself! See Show Note 2 for reference.

References and Show Notes

That ‘B*t’ video
B R Ambedkar on being a Bhakt*

Jennifer L. Eberhardt’s work referenced in this Media Buddhi piece on bias

Kaplan, J., Gimbel, S. & Harris, S. Neural correlates of maintaining one’s political beliefs in the face of counterevidence Sci Rep 6, 39589 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/srep39589

Thanks for listening to the podcast and reading Media Buddhi! Subscribe to receive new episodes and support our work.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mediabuddhi.substack.com

View Details

Can understanding these seven words help us make better conversation, or failing that, make us understand the tricky subjects that they relate to? In this, our first episode of Media Buddhi A-Z, we bring you some riveting examples and some (hopefully intelligent) speculation.

Here are some questions asked and answered:

Is the viral kachcha badam trend on Instagram a case of appropriation? What, then, of Ranveer Singh in Gully Boy?

Are we living in the world of George Orwell’s 1984 or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World?

How can we distinguish between echo chambers and filter bubbles?

How can we use the framework of A NICE to help us deal with WhatsApp forwards?

And more.

Next episode: Words starting with the letter ‘B’.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mediabuddhi.substack.com

View Details

Dear friends,

Media Buddhi A-Z is finally here! This week, we’re introducing it with a trailer, which is a 4:09 chunk from the first episode, which focuses on words starting with the letter A.

The podcast is hosted by all three of us who work at boomlive.in and in each episode, we pick one letter and run through a few terms from that letter.

For the letter A, the words are authenticity, authoritarian, algorithm, appropriation, allyship, anxiety, and anonymous.

Words matter. When we have the right vocabulary, we can begin to approach tricky, sensitive topics with understanding and empathy. When we have a shared consensus (to the extent possible), we can cross the ‘battle-lines’ of each issue.

We believe that this project is crucial for all citizens in a hyper-polarised world.

But why a podcast?

An audio-only medium is intimate, and it allows us to address each of you directly. Moreover, a podcast is a space where we can make mistakes, correct each other and evolve a sophisticated understanding of any concept. Think of it as a ‘first draft’.

Finally, a podcast allows us to focus on quality without sacrificing length. A comparative exercise on text would mean publishing several longform essays that many might not find the time to read. On the other hand, you can listen to this podcast while doing your chores!

Our first episode drops next Thursday on 23rd June. We’ll publish each episode on Thursday mornings at 8:30 am IST.

Here’s to a better understanding of the world that we live in!

• Venkatesh, Divya, Archis

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mediabuddhi.substack.com