Some positives of content creation for Nepal
In today’s world, content creation involves more than just having a meaningful thing to say or a relevant issue to speak on. The formal, editing and designing aspect of the content is also important to creators. With more avenues for formal control, social media websites can expect to grow in user-base, and creative engagement with those websites might also take place for longer durations.
Popular apps like Snapchat and Tiktok (recently banned in Nepal) are examples where editing and designing videos is a user-centric process. Such a process allows users to feel more ‘in charge’ of their content, and thus motivates them to create more. A service which withheld such creative control would not prove as satisfying to users, even if it allowed wide dissemination of their content.
The uptake of such apps and services in the Nepali public can be attributed not only to the opportunity to raise voice but also to show one’s skills in communication and expression. Views, reactions and comments reward and recognize the ability to present in media in tandem with the words and ideas presented. In short, not just what you say but how you say it is more important than before.
It is in part due to the disabling of ‘expression’ (how one says something) and not just curtailment of content (or ‘speech’—what one says) that there has been an outcry over the loss of freedoms since the popular TikTok app got banned by the Nepal government. Freedom of expression is concerned with more than just publishing of the content. It is concerned with how proactively one arrived at that content. Users want the government to see that doing an investigation and/or processing available data in depth are instances of the meaningful work behind an act of expression published online.
Synthetic media
A technology which has been prevalent since the advent of computers, but which has grown significantly more sophisticated today, is ‘synthetic media.’ It is about to make content creation even more exciting. Synthetic media is any media (in visual, audio and/or text format) that has been made using computers. Of late, Artificial Intelligence has been used to create synthetic media. For example, in text-based synthetic media services (ChatGPT is an example), a textually articulated idea can be transformed into a news article or essay that the service produces by itself.
In the near future, creation of sophisticated synthetic media will be inexpensive and efficient. This bodes well for certain sections of Nepali society. Small-businesses can create advertisements for their products using synthetic media, thereby sidestepping a costly production process. In a different case, teachers can use synthetic media to present their ideas more clearly. For one, if preliminary ideas are acquired with relative ease due to the use of synthetic media in presenting, then the more technical and cutting-edge education can also be made part of the curriculum.
Extremely pertinently for Nepal’s case, synthetic media can help with public messaging on critical issues such as health and discrimination. Development organizations can create videos that are able to vividly represent the problems that they want to address. Effective communication of such societal problems would enable communities themselves to deliberate and enact solutions.
In all, a positive picture
With the use of synthetic media, Nepal’s media landscape is likely to be both representative of a diversity of voices and rich with meaningful expression. But, the potential to create meaningful content needs to be harnessed more strongly in our case. At the very least, there is a need to look carefully to see whether a rural-urban gap is developing in the production of content.
To gain a more organized outcome from a technological resource, the particular roles that it can play for particular groups needs to be explored clearly first. Thereafter, policies must be made with a clear goal of supporting positive outcomes for each of the groups using the technology.
