Technology- the future of politics?

In the light of the recent events, we all have been made to question the very purpose of technology itself. It began as a medium to help reduce the distance between the world and the rest is history. The Facebook data ‘leak’ enraged all of us but the ugly truth is, we allowed this to happen. We did agree to the terms and conditions and with the way technology is developing, nothing on the internet is safe. From being irrelevant, technology has become one of the primary platforms to fight elections over the past 2-3 decades and that includes the United States and India, some of the biggest if not the biggest democracies in the world.

The aim of campaigning for elections is to muster votes. In our contemporary society, no one has time anymore to go out and stand for hours to listen to politicians speak. Those who do go to rallies are the ones who have already decided that they will vote the party/politician they are going to listen. But political parties need votes from people who haven’t come to rallies. Earlier newspapers were one such means for parties to propagate their ideology, followed by radio, television and now finally, the internet. As the medium kept evolving, so did it’s impact.

We all are glued to our phones today. We keep on passively checking facebook to see what’s new and this increased frequency has helped parties not only influence electoral outcomes but also one’s beliefs. There are very few media sources that have remained politically neutral with most of them inclining to one of the many or even just one of the two political preferences there may be. We generally subscribe to those sources which reaffirm our own belief, no matter how skewed they may be, which makes us live in a bubble.

Moreover, all our data is openly available on the internet. Every picture we have ever posted and every comment we have ever made on the internet. Political parties then can not only know everything about us but also how they can influence our decisions. It is the misuse of social media like Facebook can change our voting preference even without our knowledge. However, neither are people going to stop using social media nor are political parties stop going to misuse it.