“Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community. Then they were quickly silenced, but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It’s the invasion of the idiots.”
- Umberto Eco (Trans. T. Bolin)
Nobody would perhaps mind the statement as each one considers oneself as a wise one and feels invaded by the others, the idiots. The problem, as pointed out by Eco, however, is an old criticism of democracy and any democratic space, wherein or where heads count, brains do not. Hitherto, it appears, if Eco's observation is taken as valid, that the idiots remained sidelined and hardly made an impact, whereas the wise ones were in the helm and guided the society through amiable association. This, tragically, is a gross misconception. It has been in the very symposia of the wise, the anti-philosophies and the anti-knowledge systems of thoughts proliferated and one having the patronage of the raw power prevailed over others. In reality, the knowledge hardly commanded power ever, and mostly power was counted as knowledge. And now it is the social media, which gives us the opportunity to fight for our reasoned cause in the minds of the peopple and make knowledge democratic and by only making knowledge democratic we can fight out the tyranny of the ideologies regarded as the fulcrums of perfect wisdom in the views of their respective adherents. These were the ideologies, which have been tormenting our lives in the worst way from the begining of civlization. It is the power of the social media that it provides the smallest of minority or each one having access to it, and of course even to a loony, some space. Knowledge never had a better chance to prove itself.
Niraj Kumar Jha
