Social Sorting and Media

chillibreeze writer — Chandni Moudgil

The theme at a seminar on the Unique Identity Project that I attended got a million thoughts running into my head. In a flash I was taken to all the media and cultural stereotypes courses that I attended at my post grad school. Amazed at how technology was getting the better of us, in a strange creepy way – I tried to put two and two together. This strange twist of psychology meets technology got me thinking – is the prejudice surrounding us seeping out to in or is it the other way around?

He goes on to spin a Mission-Impossible-meets-Avataar tale as the audience takes it all in spell-bound. A techno-graphic picture of an uber-modern India, complete with biometric systems that recognize finger prints, iris scans and facial features. A world of UID, where being termed a citizen or an immigrant is retro as we transform into alpha-numeric codes (a unique identity number) in the huge database of billions of fellow inhabitants. Nope no room here for a Frank-Abagnale-isque ‘catch me if you can’ con-acts.

Enthralled, as they ooh-ed and aah-ed in admiration of the picture perfect world being painted by the speaker, who leads one of the most ambitious projects in the history of modern India, Nandan Nilekani, one can’t help wondering. Are we literally legalizing profiling?

Profiling, Sorting, Classifying – demystified

The idea isn’t really unique and one can get an entire alphabetic list of countries world wide that have gone ahead and realized various avatars of the same idea. Called by different names, they mostly serve more or less the same function. These numbers record, as the master-craftsman of the entire game plan proclaims - You are who you claim to be.

This number is used by various agencies, commercial or administrative as ‘the identity factor’ as they go about doing their work. Be it procuring a post paid connection or a new health policy, filing your taxes, applying for a visa or in fact something as basic as opening a bank account or joining a new employer! Seemingly all in good faith you may say. Not quite, I fear.

Under the garb of security or ease of records, are we getting neatly catalogued into a complex grid that enlists perhaps more information than we are willing to share? Imagine the number of agencies, institutions and bodies who’ll be taking a royal dip into this pool of very personal data. Social sorting indeed has come in a long way from the friendly neighborhood department store CCTV surveillance.

Smile! You are on camera:
Research has an interesting way of defining commonly known but rarely acknowledged basic facts of life. So when studies shows how we are being watched 24 * 7 when we are out in the public domain – workplace, shopping malls, browsing online-- we don’t break into bouts of anxiety. We question the reasoning behind it, only perhaps when our screen idols suffer the humiliation of being singled out on and off screen because of their second name (“My name is Khan, And I am not a terrorist!”). Surveillance experts call it social sorting based on behavior patterns that they find ‘suspicious’. They may have their own ‘definition’ of ‘suspicion-arousing-behavior’, but in the most unsuspecting ways, social profiling is a stark reality of our everyday life, much beyond the security terminals and multiplex entry points.

Stereotypes – Reality vs Rhetoric
If you’ve cracked a ‘dumb blonde’ joke or think ‘gujjus in general are senile misers’, you are one among the billion who classify and categorize people based on their socio-cultural background. That’s perhaps a dummy’s working definition of ‘social sorting’ in real life. One needn’t overtly discriminate on the basis of gender, religious beliefs or regional backgrounds, but humans are culturally wired to ‘classify as a means to identify.’ It’s the social machinery that we see working around us, and it slowly becomes a way of life for us too.

So, the sight of some one wearing a turban or burqua or a skimpy skirt renders a mental imagery with a label pinned on it for most of us. Popular media as a reflection of popular culture generally uses these labels (referred to as socio-cultural stereotypes) to construct engaging and relatable stories. Its one thing to be on the butt of ‘fat’ or ‘dark skinned’ or ‘bihari’ jokes when you are in school , quite another to experience that being played out in techni-colour and quite something else when your life becomes a series of inter-related scenes from ‘The Truman Show’.

So if too many tele-callers are trying to sell you insurance policies and loans , and you get holiday package mailers in your inbox almost every day, you are clearly being profiled and targeted based on your web behavior, consumption patterns, social standing and cultural background.

The Jig saw puzzle: Many faces of media
For most people, media as a term is uni-dimensional to the extent of being limited to what we see of TVread with our morning cup of tea/occasionally go out to watch over the weekend for entertainment.

Largely, the term ‘media’ (and its one of those few things one learns at an MBA school) envelopes all possible medium that impart information in an audio and/or visual manner. CCTV footage, radio jingles, mailers in our spam folders, ad-banners on web pages, little stick –on notes that we leave on the fridge and the Facebook wall that we update regularly are all different faces of the same phenomenon – media. All built on, amongst many principles, the idea of profiling.

Marketers find a better bang for buck, if they know what kind of person is consuming a particular kind of media. This helps them package their communication better. So far so good. But the horror story starts when I am targeted with the most peculiar products for something that doesn’t really define me as a person, but only as a representative of a community.

Imagine the plight of someone who’s enrolled in a weight watchers program, who gets chocolate sampled in her direct mailer, or the more recent case of an Indian ex-security person being denied the Canadian Visa because of his past profession.

We can keep debating endlessly about brands and businesses who’ve created empires based on prejudices such as colour of skin (Fair & Lovely) or social class ( when was the last time you saw a contemporary liberal Muslim family in any film or ad?). You could laugh them off as being over-reactive or exaggerating, but when you are picked out of a crowd the next time for being too thin, too dark, too fat, too tall, too rich, of a particular gender or a religion or class or group, the joke could be on you!

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Chillibreeze's disclaimer: This is a contributed article and was published on Chillibreeze in July, 2010. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the views of Chillibreeze as a company. Chillibreeze has a strict anti-plagiarism policy. Please contact us to report any copyright issues related to this article. The relevance of the facts and figures cited (if any) could change after a period of time.

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—About our writer:

Chandni Moudgil is a Marketing Communications professional based out of Delhi. She has worked closely with some of the most coveted brands in telecom, media and luxury retail. An enthusiastic blogger and travel buff, she believes travel-writing is the best way to see the whole world without moving an inch. A worshipper of the written word, her eternal adulation for celluloid, belief in the power of a camera-lens and utter devotion to conversations over coffee, make her world go round.

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