THE MEDIUM, NOT THE MESSAGE

We live in an age where there is an economy built on distraction and a complete corruption of attention.

KALLI PURIE 

Vice-chairperson & Executive Editor-in-Chief, India Today Group

Tell me everything, the juice, the nuance, the details, and you got... 8 seconds. That's how long readers, viewers take to swipe to the Next Big Thing. Here is some trivia. We scroll 30 centimetres every 5 seconds. In a week, your thumb has scrolled 2.7 kilometres... pretty good workout!

I cannot imagine a more exciting but challenging time to be running a media organisation. We have two divergent megatrends, pulling in opposite directions-one, the empowerment by social media that has brought about a liberalisation of the freedom of expression. These new tools have given voice to large sections of society in India, which earlier went unheard, unintentionally. So, many alternative facts and truths are available, but the second megatrend is that we do have very highly shortened attention spans. You have a lot more nuance, but nobody wants to listen, so someone is always going to feel unheard and ignored. So, what is, and what should be, the role of a media organisation in a time like this? Is anyone with a camera and a Twitter and a YouTube account a media organisation? Is he a journalist? What is unbiased information these days? One person's terrorist is another's freedom fighter, one person's truth is another's lie. How do you distil?