Art project to create an antithesis of ‘WhatsApp University’

"It wants people to check their own biases as a way of critical thinking"

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As a graduate in information design and communications head in the development sector, Tejas Pande has always sought to understand how people consume information and respond to presentations of truth. With the onset of the pandemic, Pande noticed an inflection of sorts at "WhatsApp university", India's most distrusted source of news.

"After the Janata Curfew and the lockdown, I noticed a shift in how people were behaving in WhatsApp groups. It was interesting to see how people were refiguring the way they consume content," says the 33-year-old who has now received a grant under Now On, a Pro Helvetia New Delhi initiative to get artists and organisations to respond to the global health disaster with innovative ideas, thoughts and experiments.

Talking about the project, Akshay Pathak, Head at Pro Helvetia New Delhi says, “We at Pro Helvetia New Delhi are too overwhelmed with the response we have received. It only goes out to show how this global pandemic has further inspired artists in the region to create and share their art with the world.”

Pande's experiments with the infodemic led him to devise an interactive project called "WhatsApp-Free university". "WhatsApp university is a slur that is hurled at someone operating out of ignorance. My project is an antithesis to this notion of WhatsApp university. It wants people to check their own biases as a way of critical thinking," says Pande who has noticed more receptivity to objective, fact-based news in varying groups on WhatsApp and other social media platforms in the last few months.

By way of example, he mentions a recent WhatsApp forward of Arnab Goswami lashing out at opposition parties over India's GDP growth slump, where the contraction of 23.9 per cent was not as bad as countries like Singapore, Canada, the UK, the US, according to the news anchor. But Pande also noticed another related WhatsApp forward, equally popular, which pointed out tiny contextualizations like the numbers can't be compared because the scale has to be annual, not quarterly, and that GDP is not the only indicator of growth. Another instance was forwards around handling of Covid in Maharashtra, where people with clear-cut political sympathies grudgingly appreciated the good work of individuals from opposing parties. 

"I want to take away the taint of ignorance and bias from WhatsApp in popular perception. This can be a thinking university. How do people take control of the platform rather than becoming critical of it," he says about WhatsApp-Free university project which seeks to encourage engagement with one's cognitive biases in tier-II and tier III cities in Maharashtra, a social setting Pande is more familiar with.

He will devise seven bi-lingual videos in Marathi and English as group experiments for the project. Some of these videos will explain contemporary infomedia-speak like echo chamber, algorithms, risk analysis, confirmation bias, etc., as WhatsApp forwards in social groups from smaller cities and towns in Maharashtra using local idioms in ways which are non-technical and jargon-free. Straight translations will be avoided. So, the word Echo Chamber in Marathi is explained as "getting caught up in a storm of similar ideas". Algorithm, which Pande believes needs to be talked about in a better way than writing 'algos' in Devanagari, is “social media technology rules". 

In his latest explanatory video, shared in batches, Pande explains the idea of bias and what it does in a social setting when people exchange information. WhatsApp forwards may seem new, challenge or confirm already existing biases, the video says using coloured pieces in an abstract representation.

"Biases inherently are not negative traits. It is a way in which our brains process information faster---information that I already have to process more information faster. When a barrage of information like memes and forwards are hit at us from every direction, we use more of that information to process new information faster rather than engage with content first-hand. That's when the relationship becomes problematic," says Pande who was surprised to see positive nods to this video from the older generation.

Some even asked for a list of organisations that bust myths and are into fact-checking. The video ends on a note that we have to learn to confront our biases and work on them. "That's the only way to exist in a very dense environment full of information," says Pande. 

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