Wars, polls, sports: The year a constant melee buried the seminal

What should have happened to be considered as important by many, if not most, in 2023? And what will linger when all about this year melts away in the crucible of time? 

As we approach 2024, these questions turn more daunting, with fleeting images and distant sounds of this year’s events, which had once clogged public and personal recall. In 2023, after all, we constantly grappled with the challenge of weeding out the immediate to grasp the essential.

This was evident even globally. With the pandemic’s shadow having disappeared, there was not a single issue to converge global attention. Wars rage, and conflicts continue to simmer, but does any have an instant claim to the top of the pecking order when we try to recall the world in 2023?

In eastern Europe, the Ukraine-Russia war, which broke out in February last year, continues unabated. With Moscow set to  make significant gains and Kyiv relying on a slew of western powers led by the US for military aid and arms, the war outlived the year. In West Asia, Israel and the Gaza-based militant group Hamas are locked in fierce fighting claiming thousands of lives since October when Hamas led a terror attack on Israel. At the same time, conflicts such as the eight-month-long civil war in Khartoum and Darfur region of Sudan are showing no signs of cooling down any time soon. 

But, with any of them, or all of them put together, one isn’t sure whether they can form the centrepiece of our global perch of news and views, the way they could have 20 years ago. They now have to compete with an array of pixelated images, viral posts eyeing global audiences on social media, and the split chambers of opinion, often boxed into binary polarising views. 

So how to spot the seminal in this constant melee like before? How to filter out the delicate negotiations between the developed and developing countries at the COP-28 in Dubai from the online vortex of opinion makers?

The challenge seems far closer at home, where the search for important national markers is marred by a transient daily lure of online virality within the news space.

This has meant that the national register can become regional, local and hyperlocal based on how many social media clicks it’s already getting or likely to get. To add to that, that may set the evening agenda for many TV channels, and endless chatter on social media platforms, often swinging between outrage and ridicule. This is often a recipe for trivialisation of the news universe, with rare exceptions like a viral video foregrounding the gravity of ethnic strife in Manipur and triggering national conversations about the crisis.

This confusion can reflect itself in different ways in the political sphere. The sense of what constitutes the political has been increasingly draped in hues of electoral battles, and far less in the everyday interplay of policies, power and governance. Even the poll battles seem a distant blur in a year that saw more than half a dozen assembly polls in different parts of the country, in small and big states alike.

Turning the elections into spectator sports – a shorthand for political coverage across the  conventional and burgeoning digital media – has meant that 2023 was again a year of over-covered polls. The definition of what constitutes the “run-up to the polls” has been redefined by the overcoverage of elections. And the proliferation of mass media, legacy and digital, has meant the sense of election as an event now extends to covering the build-up. Moreover, even when the election process is set in motion the element of overkill doesn’t dissuade a variety of media platforms from overextending poll coverage to the point where it’s their battleground for registering attendance.

In spatial terms, it has meant local, regional and national platforms competing for the poll feed. In other ways, it also sees a parachute variety of election coverage foraying into the turf of regular chroniclers. Further, the individual use of social media and platforms such as YouTube for election coverage has cluttered an already crowded space. Instead of a replication fatigue weaning away any actors in this space, there is a heightened sense of build-ups.

Even the engagement with public recreational events such as competitive sports hasn’t been left unaffected. 

The exercise of assigning significance to an event has become tough, as talk about a World Cup match has to try harder for primacy over ceaseless online debates and buzz about round-the-year franchise club competitions. Even the Olympian effort, once a self-explanatory feat, next year will have to cut through the banal clutter of daily blabber. 

The sense of proportion never had a tougher contest as we try to sieve the bigger stage performances from the everyday churns. 

So while seeking a larger frame of annual recall, this year bore an enlarging imprint of a cluttered public memory, where the transient could often outshout the seminal. In some ways, it mirrored the reset of what constitutes the public sphere, as online immediacy seeks to intervene – if not tamper – with the essential register of our times.