Social Media and Peoples Movement: A view on Role of Social Media in Jallikattu Protest

 

Sathish. R

Assistant Professor, Department of Visual Communication, Mohamed Sathak College of Arts and Science.

 

ABSTRACT:

Social Media became a tool for politicians to propagate their ideas to the public and social media became a platform for common public to express their views on different socio-political issues. In January 2017, we witnessed there were huge protest across Tamilnadu supporting Jallikattu, a bull-taming traditional Tamil sport which was banned by Supreme Court of India. The messages were spread in different social networking sites and Apps to participate in the Jallikattu protest. People used Social media Like Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp to organise a massive protest .With this background this paper analyses the role of social media in Jallikattu protest.

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION:

Social Media is one of the unique features of Internet Era. People can personalize their account and personal information on social media and the can connect with others. Earlier social media seen as information creation and sharing platform for common people. Later it has been used for business by posting advertisements. Other important part of Social media is it becomes a platform to organise events and as well to organise protests and movements by common people as we have been noticed form Arab spring to Jallikattu protest. As a new tool social media which has combination of producing and sharing features of videos, Images and text messages it gave the possibilities of information discourse more speedy than print and broadcast media. The Jallikattu protest is a new history of common peoples protest in Tamilnadu and the reason behind the protest was people were connected very well with social media and responded the messages shared on it.

 

Social Media:

Merriam Webster online dictionary defines social media as forms of electronic communication (such as websites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (such as videos) (Merriam-Webster online dictionary,2004).  Social media can be understood as a networking website like Facebook, twitter and Instant Messaging Apps like WhatsApp, IMO. Social media allows people to create groups for themselves and online community in their interested topic or themes. Social media can be divided into two parts. 1. The "social" part: refers to interacting with other people by sharing information with them and receiving information from them. 2. The "media" part: refers to an instrument of communication, like the internet (Nations Daniel, 2017).

 

According to Antony Mayfield (2008) there are six kinds of Social media. Social Networks -  where people can personalize their own web page and can connect with others for example Facebook, Blogs- People can write their own thoughts and ideologies, Wikis –common website where anyone can create their content and that content is editable by others, Podcasts – audio and video files available by subscription, Forums – online discussion platform for particular or different topics, content communities- communities which organise and share particular kind of content for example: YouTube (Mayfield Antony, 2008). Now we have instant messaging service apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and IMO, these mobile applications are also fall under social media category. Many other forms of social media available for mobile platforms like Smule a music app where user can sing the song with karaoke and share it with others and there is option if you are male you can sing a song of male portion and can share it on the app, it could be used by female to sing the female portion. Dubsmash a video messaging app allows users to talk movie dialogues and songs with lip synchronization facility. Another recent mobile app is Sarahah it allows one to give anonymous feedback on others who are connected with that app.

 

Characteristic of Social Media:

Antony Mayfield (2008) describes the following characteristics of Social media: Participation, Openness, Conversation, Community, and Connectedness. Social media gives opportunity to people make conversation with others and feedback to others posts, it offers content openness to the online community who are connected each other. Hua Hu and Ding Lin (2013) explored four characteristics of Social Media: Integration, Time Effectiveness, Least Effort and Orderliness. As per their view social media can integrate people worldwide, people can respond to others messages quickly on social media, People don’t need special skills to use social media as it gives easy ways to share information,  People can edit the shard information whenever they want this feature consider as orderliness of information on social media. According to Aakash Shaw (2016) the factors for increasing number of social media users in India: Easy accessibility, Rich Environment for user generated Content, Inexpensive media, Commonality of like interests, Global connectivity and Non-expert interventions (Shaw Aakash, 2016). The cost is low for connecting social media when compare to other media, social media gives greater space for user generated content and there is no restriction of expectedness of content anyone can share his or her message/information on social media.

 

Basic Idea lies on characteristics of  social media is that people can create content in different forms such as Texts, Videos, and Images and it could be shared to millions of people in short time. People can connect with others who all are known and they can connect with strangers who have same ideology. People can create groups for specific purpose or general purpose. There is no regulatory process for filtering content thus anyone can create content according to his or her own interest. The liking, commenting and retweeting shows people’s interest and attention of the content shared on social media. Hashtag is used for trending an issue on social media especially in Twitter to grab attention of people.

 

Social Media and Social Movements:

It has often been popular, particularly in the media, to emphasize the impact of social media and the Internet in the post-election protests in Iran in 2009 and the Arab Spring of 2011. The Green Movement was often referred to as the “Twitter Revolution” during those early summer months in which revolution in Iran looked increasingly possible. The uprisings of the Arab Spring have also been described as “Facebook revolutions” or more broadly as “Internet revolutions” (Tusa Felix, 2013). Felix Tusa approached the impact of social media on social movements with framing theory. Technology allowed people to share not simply information about how and when to protest, but more importantly, to share images and videos that contributed to a different interpretation of events than that which the authorities themselves wished…Although only 26.4 percent of Egyptians had Internet access, the widespread use of Internet cafés meant that CMC played a large role in Egypt’s Arab Spring. For instance, the protest in Cairo on January 25, 2011 was organized on Facebook and reportedly had over 90,000 people signed up to its page (entitled “Day of Revolution”) where details of the protest were made public(Tusa Felix, 2013).

 

Aakash Shaw (2016) traced the factors of how the social media helped in various social movements. Shahbag movement in Bangladesh in 2013 had support from social media to organise the protest at Shahbag Square, Dhaka. Hokkolorob movement started in Jadhavpur University against problematic handling of reported case of molestation on campus on August 24, 2014, messages shared on social media and movement went on many cities of India. On September 20, an estimated hundred thousand people marched under the banner of #hokkolorob’ in Kolkata, in spite of a massive downpour.  The movement spread like wildfire via social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter, and specially on the backs of hashtags such as #Students Against Campus Violence and #hokkolorob, with just this latter earning 56,745 ‘likes’. In fact, according to Keyhole, a hashtag tracking tool, #hokkolorob alone had a reach of 342,130 users in the week the VC resigned ((Shaw Aakash, 2016). His work establishes the active participation of audience on social media for the protest and movements.

 

Social Media and Jallikattu:

Jallikattu is organised during the mid-January harvest festival, Pongal. It involves releasing a bull into a crowd of people when participants attempt to grab its hump and ride it as long as possible. Sometimes, participants must also try and remove red flags attached to the bull’s horns. The Supreme Court banned the sport in 2014, upholding concerns raised by activists who said the Jallikattu amounted to cruelty to animal besides posing a threat to humans. Between 2010 and 2014, an estimated 17 people were killed and 1000-odd were injured during Jallikatu events. The Supreme Court said, “Use of bulls in such events severely harmed the animals and constituted an offence under the Prevention of Cruelty to the Animals Act” (HT Correspondent, 2017). In 2011 Ministry of Environment and Forest included Bulls as not to performing animals list hence the traditional sports like Jallikattu, Kambala, Rekla Race all these sports are involved with bulls came under illegal as of Prevention Cruelty of Animals Act,1960.

 

In January 16 2017, over 200 people of Alanganallur village arrested by police for protesting against the ban of Jallikattu. The very next day peoples particularly youngsters gathered in Marina beach, Chennai to support the arrested people of Alanganallur. After lot of text messages, Memes, Videos shared on Facebook and WhatsApp in support of Jallikattu protest. Film stars like Actor Adhi, G.V.Praksh Kumar, Simbu, Ari and many others extended their support for the protest in the field as well as on social media that went viral. Sports stars like Vishwanathan Anand, Virendra Shewag and Rawichandran Aswin supported the cause of Jallikattu.  Adhi’s (Hip Hop Thamizha) Takkaru Takkaru a Music Album song came with support of Jallikattu in January 2016, a 12 minutes video has the combination song, stunt and interviews of Social Activist Karthikesu Senathipathi, and Farmers from Kankeyam village which is native place of famous breed of Bull – Kankeyam Kalai. The video further explained that the international corporate companies were the reason for ban of Jallikattu in Tamilnadu. Takkaru Takkaru, a Music Album song one of the major factor to create awareness of Jallikattu among youngsters in Tamilnadu. Consequently Adhi participated in the protest in Madurai in January 2017.

 

Online news portals revealed the reason behind the protest was social media. The organization and updates of the protest were actively circulated through social media. With a solid social media conversation already in place, the initially small protest gathered huge traction on social media, drawing huge numbers to the beach. Every development from there was widely shared using all forms of social media such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Images of people sleeping at the Marina beach on the first night of the protest, and the now iconic image of youngsters flashing their phone lights, were shared and re-shared with religious reverence (Aiyappan Ahameera, 2017). The success of pro-jallikattu social media campaign, which documented and spurred thousands to support the movement, is in stark contrast to the apathy towards the massive social media campaigns of the Election Commission and political parties last year in the run-up to the assembly election (# Jallikattu trumps government, 2017).Social media appeared to have played a key role in bringing together thousands of pro-Jallikattu protesters to the sprawling Marina Beach here and other parts of Tamil Nadu, with updates on the ongoing students spontaneous stir and messages flooding the platform. Social networking Sites including Facebook were awash with "Let us be united", "We want Jallikattu," and "I support Jallikattu" pages, which together account for lakhs of followers, who kept commenting on the evolving situation and pressing their cause (Social media comes, 2017).

 

The reason behind the huge protest for Jallikattu was because of the higher rural teledensity in Tamilnadu. Tamilnadu is second wireless service in rural teledensity in India and it has over 27 million internet subscription. The entire creation and organisation of the massive protests in Chennai was done online — on Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp. Classmates, colleagues, friends, relatives were all posting, tweeting, re-tweeting or forwarding messages, audio clips and videos about Jallikattu( Balaji Aditya, 2017). Markandey Katju, former Judge of Supreme Court of India was constantly gave his support for the protest through Facebook and Twitter. A meme with support of Jallikattu shared on Chennai memes Facebook page on 28 December, 2016 and it went more than 34000 shares. This is an example of how people were active in social media on Jallikattu. Facebook pages became the instant update platform of the protest. Facebook Pages like Jallikkattu Vera Vilaiyattu, Jallikattu Tamilnadu, TNstudentsjallikattu, Jallikattu Explained, Chennai Memes, Chennaites actively shared texts, memes and videos for supporting the protest. Memes which favors for Jallikattu shared on internet platform and it was re-shared and forwarded in WhatsApp.

 

 

Figure 1: Analysis of two Facebook pages

 

 

The author took two Facebook pages named Tamilnadu Jallikattu and JALLIKATTU- veeravilayattu for the analysis of how the messages of Jallikattu protest was shared on Facebook.  These two pages have more than 4000 page likes. The cumulative of share of the timeline photos of these two pages is more than five lakh. One share can be viewed by many people. This means nearly five lakh people engaged with the post shared by theses Facebook pages.

 

Datasciencedude.com explains how tweets on Jallikattu were emerged in Twitter. It took the following Hashtags for analysis: #jallikattu, #Save Jallikattu, #amendpca, #PETA, #TamilNadu, #TNneedsJALLIKATTU, #TNneedsJALIKATTU, #We Do Jallikattu, #Justicefor Jallikattu, #ISupport Jallikattu, #Alanganallur, #We Need Jallikattu, #We Want Jallikattu, #Ban Peta, #AmendPCA, #Banpetaindia, #Justice for farmers, #Marina, #Tamizhan DA, #Save Our Culture JALLIKATTU. It has to be kept in mind that the limit for the number of tweets is 10000 for each hashtag. Often each hashtag yielded less than 10000 tweets (Data shows how, 2017).

 

A representational picture (Figure1) of density of Tweets on Jallikattu shows that from January 10 the tweets for Jallikattu started but after January 17 it went more people engaged with tweets and re-tweets. Protest peaked at top from 17th January to 21th January. The Governor-in-Charge of Tamilnadu passed an ordinance on to conduct the fest across Tamilnadu. Later few people were continued the protest to give permanent solution to Jallikattu but the massive silent protest ended with violence.

 

CONCLUSION:

In 1965 students were actively participated in anti-Hindi agitation led by DMK party. In 1980s Tamilnadu saw another student movement which was supporting Sri Lankan Tamils. In both times there were no social media to organise the protest and even there were no mobile phones, the only way is distributing pamphlets which can be traced by the government. In Jallikattu protest Students and Youngsters were actively participated with no political parties ideologies. Nowadays the digital technologies enable all the possibilities of information dissemination. The Arab spring was earlier protest of which was organised through social media. People gathered across the state for Jallikattu protest, no political parties allowed to take part of the cause with the common people gathering and people did not accepted the political parties help to run the protest. This huge non-violent protest came into reality because of the social media. Although forwarded message culture is considered as the disadvantage of social media that too helped the protest as people were forwarded the photos and videos that supported the Jallikattu protest.

 

 

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Received on 24.10.2017       Modified on 18.12.2017

Accepted on 20.01.2018      ©A&V Publications All right reserved