The Indian reel-o-nomics, New York subway and road safety

It started with one of the most cliched shots of an adventure bike, low-back-angle of the rear tyre, taking off and spraying some mud around on the lens and the biker soft fading into the horizon. This was corporate footage, shot in a controlled environment and with all the safety gears on and still, TikTok flagged it. Yes, that pre-ban phase I am talking about.

Experimenting on a new platform is always tiring and if you manage to get a couple of thousand views, you feel relieved. And, after all this effort it was annoying to get a notification from the platform that the video doesn't go with the platform's guidelines. That shot wasn't reckless for sure but had to be removed finally. That phase was ultra exciting for music lovers like me, who could use any original song from the library, put it on our own video, slow-mo it and post. It was like premiering our own music video on MTV and Channel V. But that excitement was short-lived thanks to the cringe-attack on everyone's timelines. This incident taught me two things about the social media platforms, whatever is featured on our timelines is exactly what these social platforms want us to watch and if they don't want us to watch something, they will make sure that we don't. With an army of engineers, who are skilled enough to develop algorithms that can sniff out a 24 frame shot of wheel spin and flag it as irresponsible or dangerous content. This piece is about the latter.

A bodybuilder is seen snaking around on a public road, apparently hitting a biker and carrying on as if nothing has happened. He is also heard boasting that 'yeh roz ka kaam hai', is a daily thing for him. An influencer stopped the traffic on a highway to shoot a reel. One content creator put a table and a chair at the centre of a busy road and started drinking alcohol. Another group of creators bubble-wrapped their friend and hung him outside the car, while driving around on public roads. Two influencers caused chaos on a busy city street during peak hours, doing what? Throwing money in the air, and people running to catch some notes. One of them was sent for custody but when I checked, and saw the reel on Instagram, it was still there.
This list is long. Read about police action on some of these influencers and content creators, some getting penalised, challaned but is it slowing down the trend or are these reels-shorts professionals scared of these actions? Not really.

The race to the peak of absurdity is getting more and more fierce, and creators are looking for cringier ways to get ahead in this race. Rap battles are penned and released on the number of views. This trend doesn't seem to be dying down soon. Rs 17000 challans, warnings or 14 days custody don't seem to be the solution. This issue needs a different approach.

There was a fascinating case study I remember from Malcolm Gladwell's book 'Tipping Point' on the challenges of New York subways in the 80s. The train service was facing major vandalism, and ticketless travelling but the issue I wanted to highlight today was the graffiti problem. We see graffiti as an urban, pop, art and cultural statement today, but it was a big menace and a social policy issue for the New York City Transit Authority in the 80s. In fact, graffiti was much more than a vandalism issue for them, it represented a complex law and order and economic problem. It was a training ground for future offenders, committing serious crimes and it also indicated a fearful environment for the passengers causing low ridership. One of the studies I found, summarised the problem as - "..relatively trivial but the aggregate effects on the people are massive." The way I see the content creators flouting road safety rules is just the tip of the iceberg, part of a much bigger problem. They are normalising traffic violations and trivialising the 1.68 lakh road deaths on the Indian roads.

Anyway, when the Authority started its operation against those graffiti artists, they faced serious challenges like the budget, manpower and perseverance of the graffiti artists. Every clean cart was covered in new graffiti in no time. A number of strategies were tried and discussed (including the usage of attack dogs to chase the graffitists according to one report) but success remained elusive. Eventually what worked was the targeting of these youngsters' psychology. What started as an innocent expression of art and society etc, had turned into a statement, a signature for these artists, traincoaches were used as a canvas and passengers were their audience. And, the authorities attacked this very motivation. They started with a couple of coaches freshly painted by the youngsters or 'tagged' as they used to call it. The moment police personnel used to spot such graffiti, those coaches were reported, removed from the runs, taken to the yards and cleaned immediately. This discouraged the artists as they slowly understood that their work of art wasn't going to be visible anymore. Their efforts are cleaned before they reach their audience. The authority started with a small batch of new coaches, and kept cleaning them again and again. This number kept increasing till the time all the coaches were cleaned. In today's context, their views went down, slowly and steadily. Their videos weren't going viral anymore.

I guess, the authorities in India need to think along those lines and target the motivation of these creators. Since reels and shorts are also the backbone of the creator economy, and not only creative expressions or views-fetching content pieces, the strategy needs a focus on psychology and economics. The challans and warnings are big disincentives but the incentive of views is much bigger. Government agencies should engage with social media platforms to push for an evolved algorithm which can filter dangerous reels and shorts which make Indian roads unsafe, promote reckless driving and pull them down.

And, all of us need to take a step back as well. Many share such stunts and videos as virtue signalling, and some genuinely want to criticise the acts but as we all know about the social platforms, any publicity is good publicity these days.