The only videos/pictures I mainly see of India don’t explicitly try to show india in a negative light, but implicity do. Stuff like videos of people using their bare feet as tools to work on items, unsanitary restaurant conditions, etc.
I’ve never been to India (on my list), I love Indian people, their culture, and especially their food. Because of that, I’m relatively certain those videos are hand picked to go viral, but I don’t have anything real to compare it to (my own experience). But also, the disgust seems very manufactured, with frequent racist comments as well in those posts.
Has anybody else noticed this?
If you’re going to talk about Reddit, I’ve found that there is a somewhat sizeable Indian community on the platform. Some of the videos I watch have the same tone of local American politics videos on Reddit.
My Reddit usage has gone down over the past few years, but a lot of the videos I see on Reddit about India seem to be by Indians for India and have people writing in various Indian languages in the comments. A lot of them seem to critique India as other countries would critique themselves.
That said, you and I may be seeing different videos.
You’re right that I should have clarified, that’s ignoring the Indian based subreddit, which as you state are a lot more normal.
Medium is singular. Media is plural and so doesn’t need an s.
It’s not a specifically Indian issue, it’s generalized. It’s also not intentional, just a result of the way virality works.
Because the clips most likely to go viral are those that agree with stereotypes (fat American, lazy Mexican, drunk Russian, thieving Romanian, etc ad infinitum), those are the ones you see. Then people make more of them because it’s an easy way to get clicks. They’re popular because they reliably cause the same arguments (and thus engagement).
The machine does not care about anything but maximizing eyeballs on their platforms.
I would have expected what you’re saying to be true, but what I find interesting is I have seen less of the other stereotypes than of the Indian stereotypes. It’s a bit strange in my mind the inequality when you would expect them all be appear equally.
To play devil’s advocate, there are more videos that show these stereotypes than not. To quote racists everywhere, “stereotypes exist for a reason”. But it’s important to remember that humans everywhere are literally almost identical, and the reason stereotypes exist is worth looking into in order to acknowledge why we might have inherent biases. In OPs example, India is poor as fuck, and a lot of people just don’t have shoes because of that history of wealth inequity
imo, it’s ragebait. Negative posts + a desire of the target audience to be validated = Engagement = More revenue
Does it’s mean it’s wholly false? Probably not. More likely, there’s a measure of truth, even a small amount of it. The rest could be emphasized or exaggerated to hit that engagement.
Agreed, but what I found interesting is how it’s more common with Indian culture than others. I have seen these, seemingly, ragebait videos with other cultures, but it feels like there’s more with Indian culture.
As stated its conformation bias. I am currently in India now and there is granted a much greater disparity between rich and poor and both the things you stated above, there will be things that shock. That said it is a fantastic, massively diverse and rapidly emerging country, well worth discovering. Also it is very devolved state wise culturally, linguisticly etc. You experience will very depending on which state your in
Could you expand more on your 2nd to last sentence? What do you mean be devolved?
Yeah it could just be confirmation bias, it’s definitely hard to confirm those things, and the paranoia with country backed actors trying to affect social media complicates things more.
Something happened recentlyish… there was a time when india and US hegemony were politically aligned then russian war happened and India having far far deeper connection with russia, decided to show their loyalty to them.
Historically, USA has been either pro-Pakistan or pro-India because of the steategic location (next to China) and india pakistan fighting all the time.
Right now, its Pakistan’s term to be on “good list”.
