Role of Social Media in Un-silencing Muffled Voices

Social media is the voice of the masses, and it listens to all the voices and reaches out to others who are not generally recognized by mainstream politics. The voices that are deliberately ignored by digital or print media are the voices we hear on social media. Now, there are two types of questions. The first is whether these voices exist or not. And must these issues be heard and resolved? And secondly, would the restrictions on social media resolve these issues?

However, it is essential to strengthen the growing national identity and national ideology while resisting the fascism of state institutions. It is also important to know that people who love the country are ordinary people who protest on the roads. People have no right to protest even peacefully. And if they do so, they are labelled as traitors. And we are left with only a handful of those patriots who run the state institutions.

Does it imply that our only resistance was against the British? And as a result, we got all the die-hard nationalist values we never get tired of preaching. Was that nation manufactured in a factory in an artificial way? And that could no longer even suffer a technical failure?

Do those people living in this country have no problems and do not even need to be heard? Is that the only reason worth believing what the rulers tell you? Is the truth of the common masses no longer a truth? Are the convicts traitors? The only history we have is the history that fascists have written. Do the victims have no history? People who teach the truth should know that truth is a force that will tear down history. When lies are manufactured, and truth is distorted, the forms of truth leave their mark on the annals of history so that we can see them peering between the lines. And the nations we find at the height of resistance, and all those people who come out to fight for the integrity of the constitution and the country’s survival, cannot be so easily warded off as traitors.

 

A nation is a collective community based on different class systems, regions, religions, and races, and it must face economic and social discrimination from each other based on the class system. Who will bridge the gap between the rich and the poor while both are part of the same nation? When are the poor oppressed, and the state institutions and their constituents do not listen to anyone? We also need to think about the reality of how much freedom we have gained as a nation. The lives of the poor and helpless have not changed even after the freedom from colonial rule. Then what kind of liberation do we often refer to?

All the social media platforms that give voice to the marginalized, the oppressed and the poor strengthen their resistance. Social media has successfully created a virtual space where different voices and their freedom of expression on national issues have been made possible.

We are accustomed to weighing things in just two ways. On one side, there are forces of goodness, and on the other side are evil. Something is totally right; then, suddenly, something becomes totally wrong. But we also know that life is much more complex in its essence and there is more to life that cannot be put in just two boxes. We need to understand the views of others and find the truth by comparing different points of view on both sides. Social media enables us to provide a space that is neither white nor black. For example, mainstream media in Pakistan has its own objectives and is driven by political logic. However, social media is not bound by such political logic and can promote voices that cannot be so easily given access to.

Thus, social media not only provides a platform for these voices but also provides a place where they can be compared to public statements and where diverse opinions can be presented. These are the voices that have resisted imperialist forces in the past, the imperial system that has now been replaced by state institutions. The inability of mainstream culture to create political space for muffled voices is directly related to our historical and political landscape.

There are many ethnicities in Pakistan that have different cultural and linguistic identities. Cultural, ethnic, and linguistic facts are considered contradictory from the dominant national perspective. Ideas are not products made in factories; they should be created naturally by the voice of the people, and theory emerges from practice, and it cannot be an officially created brand. Diverse voices of people having different narratives are based on their lived experiences and are also true to the spirit of the nation. The concept of a nation is made up of ordinary people, not statesmen alone.

A nation is made not just by a handful of rulers. We are all a nation. The voices of the masses must be included in the national narrative rather than being oppressed by the national narrative. Thanks to social media, it is impossible to ignore the voices of resistance that are trying to find a place in society to foster a democratic environment.