Social media takes you back to tribalism: Shekhar Kapur

Mumbai: It was a lucky day for Shekhar Kapur. Cisco Systems invested around Rs 27 crore in his new venture, Qyuki, a social media platform designed to crowdsource creative content. The project, which had already roped in AR Rahman as an investor, will now have a new partner. Kapur, director of Bandit Queen, Mr India and Elizabeth, addressed a session at the India Leadership Summit organised by Nasscom on Wednesday. He spoke to Firstpost on the sidelines of the summit about his new venture, the hype about social media and how it has changed the texture of society. Excerpts: [caption id=“attachment_214984” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=" “The idea of expressing yourself or influencing others is too strong to be temporary.” Reuters"] [/caption] Q. To begin with, what is Qyuki and what will it do? A. Qyuki is a social media platform where people can come and express their thoughts. We will provide the provocation to express themselves. People can  interact in a creative way, and through the competitiveness and interaction, content will be created. The idea is to unlock the inherent creativity in an  individual that was locked till now. The idea has come from the number of people I have met over the past 20 years who have ideas but do not have a place to express themselves. Q. There have been raging debates on the censorship of  social media recently. What is your take on that? A. The primary role of social media has been to reassess the role of “Gatekeepers” in our society; for example, the government is a gatekeeper. A linear way of operating an industry, like the music industry, or life in general, has been the way. Gatekeepers keep it that way because it suits them. Social media has taken the power from gatekeepers and put it back in the hands of the community. So the censorship we are talking about today will not come from gatekeepers. The community will throw out what is undesirable. Q. But the community — which is also society — could censor ideas it does not approve of anyway. For example say, gay marriages. So will the community, in turn, become a gatekeeper again? A. By artificially putting up a censor, you do not know whether it is doing what the community wants. You are also assuming that the community does not want gay marriages because gatekeepers are saying no to it. We do not yet know what the community or the society at large actually wants. You are also looking at a very small community. A social media platform, let’s say Facebook, has a community of 750 million. The small community might be more censorious than the society at large. And this community is constantly interacting and exploring, a process that will eventually make them less censorious about things. Q. You are talking of crowdsourcing creative content — making something creative together. You could perhaps make a film and then go out and share it with others via social media. Have you worked out a business logic of that? A. Films, firstly, don’t cost you much. People are making films even for $500. So we assume that films will cost a bomb. The guy who made the documentary on Kashmir and shared it on Youtube on 26 January because it was censored otherwise might have shot it for nothing. So, to begin with, it might just be an assumption that it is a huge cost to recover. Ninety-nine percent of what is watched might have been made for $100 and not those for millions and millions of dollars. Even something made for a million dollars could be pirated. So you cannot look at this new world with old ideas. Q. Is this euphoria about blogging, tweeting or Facebook-ing temporary? A. The idea of expressing yourself or influencing others is too strong to be temporary. How many times do you hear he crossed a million followers or 5,000 friends? It is the idea of influence, where wealth is being measured in terms of that influence, that is changing things. It is like going back to tribalism in good sense of the term. The whole idea of individuality or privacy is a created idea. As human beings we like to live in a community, essentially going back to our tribal origins. The only thing is that today we are being able to create a tribe of 700 million people. You are giving people freedom of thought. Once they get used to it they are never gonna give it up. If you try and curb it, it is like pushing a balloon down. You push it somewhere and it will come up somewhere else. Who would give up freedom of thought?