Narrative Alert
The narrative-building exercise is a data war and it’s happening everywhere, it happening in corporates, in international trades, in stock exchanges, in academia, in media, in war zones, in technology development, and everywhere. — Alok Singh
The narrative has an important role in earning support for an idea, gaining a market for a consumer product, availing services, convincing the audiences, to follow health practices, running the system, advertising the product, and selling the services that in turn resulting in a favorable outcome for the narrative builders in terms of financial revenue and public support or whatever is the desired target for the narrative builders. The narrative builders have to defend themselves from the opponent’s narrative and this results in a sequence of narrative and counter-narrative building races. The race becomes intense and below-the-belt benchmarks keep sliding, this happens usually in the political domain whether that be local politics, regional politics, national politics, or international politics. But the elections happen every five years and relying on the wrong narrative to win elections has a short-term gain only as the voters in the next election punish those politicians and political party or group of politicians and political parties who build the wrong narrative to cheat voters. There do exist other domains apart from politics where the existence of wrong narratives is deadly to the existence of civilization. The countering of such narratives and setting the correct narrative is the responsibility of every knowledgeable and able individual as well as organization. The contemporary civilization provides a vast platform and sources for spreading narratives. Academics and media are the two important domains where reversing the established wrong narrative is a tough job.
The civilization of narrative building and narrative demolishing existed for a long and it has become an important driver today as life has become fast as well as lengthier and the access to social media platforms to everyone has turned the narrative building exercise to twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, non-stop marathon race. The damage due to the wrong narrative by the wrong group of people is so high that the right narrative by the right group of people is the only visible solution. Every responsible citizen should own the responsibility to demolish the wrong narrative even if it does not affect their personal life but affects their social, national, human, and planet’s life then they should do their part in setting the wrong narrative right. The wrong narrative will of course die naturally in the long term but the cost of short-term ignorance of the wrong narrative is like waiting for monsoon to extinguish the burning house.
The narrative building has various tools including awareness campaigns, data-based reports, journal publications, editorials in newspapers, articles in magazines, debates and panel discussions on television, posts on social media platforms, course curriculum, school syllabus, arts, theater, cinema, music, drama, painting, movies, literature, stories, poems, poetries, entertainment, conferences, seminars, books, even sports and any other format that involves a group of individuals as a participant or as an audience. The important element in narrative building is to engage outsiders whether it be an individual or an organization to do the narrative building on behalf of the interested individual or organization country or group of other entities. The corporate world and the manufacturing sector as well as the services sector are the leaders in the narrative setting and the same tools are being engaged by political parties and social organizations including religious organizations to propagate their narrative. There are many illustrations of failed narratives that have killed the establishment and damaged it so much that it is yet to be revived. In our own country a narrative was set by the vested interest that all of us need iodized salt and the awareness campaign was extensively run by the government from the government treasury later the Supreme Court nullified the mandatory consumption of iodized salt and this whole narrative was demolished by Swadeshi Jagran Manch but the damage that it has caused is so huge that still people are unnecessarily consuming iodized salt leading to negative health repercussions and those manufacturers and traders who used to supply non-iodized salt are still missing from this business. The other narrative is by Coca-Cola which has set the narrative like” Thanda Matlab Coca-Cola”. Although it’s an advertising punchline and legally it can’t be checked. The social organizations in the sector of food and health should aggressively engage resources to counter such narratives. The other illustration is that of Cadbury Chocolates which has built up the narrative that “Pappu Paas Ho Gaya- Kuch Meetha Ho Jai” means Cadbury chocolates. They have set the narrative that Cadbury chocolates are substitutes for sweets and this has affected our traditional sweets and eating habits.
The celebrities are well paid to spread the narrative, they are paid advertisement fees and it is dominated by actors and actresses and sportspersons. Can we think of regulating legally the role of celebrities in spreading narratives? Can we come up with a framework that binds celebrities to follow practices that safeguard the consumer’s interest?
The media always positions itself as unbiased and independent of the parties involved in a particular issue. But the traces of media funding including foreign funding raise doubt about the credibility of such media houses. The narrative building always needs someone who is not linked with the issue to promote the narrative and this is like an independent think tank or independent research organization. But how independent are such think tanks and organizations? Our country has been consistently the victim of international think tanks and international research organizations who have diluted their research methodology, cherry-picked the data, and analyzed the statistical outcomes based on insufficient data and all this is nothing but narrative buildup to the malign development of our nation. The ranking of our nations in the hunger index is an example. The world of academics is full of frameworks for narrative building like the rankings of universities and the market of research paper publications.
Recently China Development Forum (CDF) clipped the wings of Prof. Stephen S Roach of Yale University. He has been attending CDF for the last twenty-five years but his current observations did not suit the narrative of CDF. Prof. Peter Higgs received the Nobel Prize in 2013 for his 1964 work on the Higgs Boson (God particle) which was confirmed in 2012. He died at the age of 94 on 8 April this year and said that in this publication-based narrative-building academia he would not have been hired by any good university as since 1964 he has less than ten publications.
The narrative-building exercise is a data war and it’s happening everywhere, it happening in corporates, in international trades, in stock exchanges, in academia, in media, in war zones, in technology development, and everywhere. We need to be alert, open our minds, and make decisions based on our judgment and our primary inputs.
(Alok Singh has a doctorate in management from the Indian Institute of Management Indore and is currently co-founder and director at AGET Business School, Jhajjar, Haryana).
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