What to keep in mind when personalising a digital image

For any of us who have used the If This Than That (IFTT) apps in order to get the smart lights to change a particular colour based on our mood, or for our coffee machines to start brewing when they notice us coming home, we know that we have immersed ourselves in the quest of extreme customisation. It is an acknowledgement of the fact that our lives are so bereft of possibility and so conscripted, that our devices are all so generic and our choices so limitless in their pointlessness, that the only way we can now realise our individuality is by crafting minute choices of futile living.
It is strange, then, that the recent news of Google Maps showing Jammu and Kashmir as disputed territory, if you view it from outside of India, triggered so much disconcert.

If we are okay with the idea that social media feeds curate and show us a friendscape that an algorithm decides, why is it so difficult to imagine that digital displays will also customise borders, divisions, and maps to the location of the user? It should have been obvious to all of us, that personalisation and customisation signal the end of a universal narrative, a singular truth, or a fixed meaning. Post-truth has not been about the peddling of lies on the unverified web. It has been about the lack of a common truth that you and I can agree on because truths and meanings are being customised to fit our realities, outlooks, and comfort zones.

It is good to recognise that the representation of Kashmir’s disputed borders differently is merely a symptom of what digital personalisation leads to. It reminds us that digital choices are political — be they about the friends we connect to or the nations we live in. And because these choices are political, it means that the quick resolutions that come from authoritarian practices — clamping down of information, internet blackouts (like we still see in Kashmir), revision of history textbooks, or a forceful erasure of multiplicity — will always be contested beyond the geographies of power and the pockets of sovereignty. It is one of the most extraordinary powers of the internet that the stories that are told about us — individually, collectively, or politically, as a nation — are going to be more and multiple than we can ever control, fathom, or keep up with. We might be able to sweep some of the dirt under the carpet, and we might even be convinced that in our manipulated pictures, everything looks clean. But the digital is a leaky system, and it will leak and share information that can no longer be given a universal meaning or singular narrative.

(Nishant Shah is a professor of new media and the co-founder of The Centre for Internet & Society, Bengaluru)