The debates surrounding Ranveer Allahabadia’s attempt at roasting a candidate of a reality show by crossing the limits of politeness and decency are mostly about whether or not to take offence at jokes or not. There are some who argue that attempting to offend a sensibility is at the heart of comedy. Jokes are ‘cracked’ and cracking anything is a violent process which is bound to affect one or the other person and that is the essence of comedy. However, comedy in itself doesn’t possess any magical quality of constructing moral knowledge or directing ethical behavior. A comic sensibility accompanied with a social or spiritual vision gives us a Shakespeare, a Cervantes or a Chaplin. Their comedy endures because the comic sensibility was directed at what they saw as socially and spiritually degrading behavior. It was aimed at recuperating decency in human behavior. Their comedy emerged from a deep understanding of the human condition. A tradition of such comedy thrived in the US with people like Richard Pryor and George Carlin inventing a whole new genre of standup comedy that were constructed as narratives and essays.
In India, political comedy thrived for a brief period of time with AIB, Kunal Kamra, Varun Grover and others, but it never managed to take off for various reasons. With the demise of political comedy, a new space for light humour emerged in the online ecosystem which was exploited by people who found a way to create and push content that was mediocre but had massive appeal with certain sections of the society, mostly middle class or upper middle class with leanings towards political and social conservatism. What they so eagerly lapped up was Allahabadia’s mediocrity. He assured them that it is cool to be mediocre. The once daring members of AIB are now part of the same mediocre light humour podcast ecosystem. They realized that there is money to be made here.
The conservative middle class audience is not so much offended by Allahabadia’s comments, instead they feel let down by their God of Mediocrity who had until now managed to give them some sort of identity as ‘podcast consumers’. Content creators like him hijacked an entire platform and habituated the audience to intellectual, political and emotional laziness. They created a space in which people found validation for their privileged life and social apathy.
The pride of such content creators is that they are self-made men. Their success is not the result of them going to a film school or a University, or having a mentor. They want us to believe that success in the new age digital media ecosystem doesn’t come from long training in an area of knowledge or skill. Instead, it is all about being smart, ambitious, daring, and doing things on one’s own. A call is being given to young people to abandon formal studies and enter into the world of content creation with one single idea. An idea is all that matters. This easily explains the explosion in the number of young aspiring content creators who want to be youtubers or podcasters.
If one reads this in parallel to the dwindling enrollment to traditional humanities disciplines like history, literature, sociology or political science, it is easy to see a connection between both these phenomena. A certain kind of hollowing out of what it means to pursue knowledge with a sense of curiosity and wonder, is at work. The pleasure of pursuit of knowledge is made to appear old fashioned, uncool, and ultimately useless. It is useless because it cannot hold people’s attention, it cannot get views, and it cannot get people hooked on to the platform. Whereas, the simple truth is that the audience is being trained not to get hooked onto such content. This is done not just by flooding the internet with mediocre content but also by actively demolishing spaces and institutions outside the internet which for centuries have nourished critical thinking and creative imagination: the University.
Recently, a member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council proclaimed that AI is going to disrupt college education, especially the lecture method of teaching. “AI tools will soon be able to replace human lectures in several subjects. Academia should use the opportunity to make quality higher education cheaply available and shift towards research”, he wrote. A lot has been said and written about how AI will disrupt or is already disrupting several sectors. Similar proclamations were made about other new technologies that emerged in the past century. Radio, motion pictures, television, computers, and the internet were all supposed to radically change our education system, making schools and teachers obsolete. Yet, we still have schools, colleges, teachers, and classrooms even after the pandemic, a time period during which we saw classrooms pushed into zoom calls. Both schools and colleges are wary of online education and insist on students and teachers reporting to campus. The education system has not changed much even with rapid advancement of existing technologies. AI is a new entrant to this list of disruptors claiming to transform education.
Hubert Dreyfus, an American philosopher, in one of his insightful commentaries on Internet technology, shows us how emotions play a crucial role in learning. He outlines the six stages of skill acquisition: novice, advanced beginner, competence, proficiency, expertise and mastery. A novice primarily requires information and context. AI or the internet can do a perfect job of providing information. However, contextualizing information is still largely the job of a human. An advanced beginner starts efficiently imitating the instructor or the teacher, but still lacks the ability to make independent decisions. A competent student has acquired the skill to an extent where she feels confident about her decisions and is prepared to take up the responsibility for those decisions. At the level of proficiency the student starts to use intuition to understand situations but responds by using memory. An expert would know how to solve and anticipate problems intuitively. A master would invent new paradigms of understanding and solving problems. A student can progress with different levels of skill acquisition, Dreyfus says, only through an emotional involvement with the skill at hand. Such an involvement is possible only in a social situation where people judge our decisions, where we feel sad about a bad decision and happy about a good one. Only a social setting which has novices and experts learning together can provide a suitable environment for skill acquisition.
Such a social setting is the classroom, the lecture hall, the auditorium, the canteen, the garden, the corridors of a University. The demise of the University as a ‘keeper of moral conscience’ has happened in parallel with the erection of the ‘podcast ecosystem’ which is trying hard to stand up as an alternative to university education. They cannot be treated as two separate phenomena. The recent attention towards the mediocre and cringe content on the internet should go along with a serious thinking about the way in which universities and colleges are being forced to transform. The college lecturer is now asked to compete with AI in order to be relevant, thus undermining the process of critical thinking and creative imagination which usually thrives well in the social setting of a university.
The author is Asst. Professor & Head, Department of English, St Joseph's College of Commerce (Autonomous), Bengaluru. Views expressed are the author's own.