Political Mobilization- A New Era

By Aarushi Bansal
 
“The Intersection of Law, Politics and Technology is going to force a lot of good thinking”- Bill Gates
 
Intergovernmental affairs have always been conducted face-to-face. However, the outbreak is forcing intergovernmental meetings online. The United Nations, its specialized agencies, and other international organizations initially cancelled or postponed large in-person meetings, but given the slow recovery of the world, these organizations are now scrambling to implement the technology and processes to meet online. Some agencies like the ITU, IMF and World Bank have made this switch easily, due to their remote participation even prior to the pandemic; while WTO is taking longer to adjust with implementing virtual participation in its formal meetings. 
 
Diplomats have little familiarity with working online in terms of negotiation capabilities. Likewise, in terms of influence, about 90% of communication is non-verbal which includes body language and eye contact, an important aspect conversing; however, in videoconferencing, the diplomats only have faces to sometimes even just their audio to convey their argument.
 
In India, the pandemic may just serve as a catalyst, bringing the new order to the forefront. Since 2014, India has seen a pretty significant shift towards digital campaigning, and WhatsApp. The pandemic has pushed all parties further in this direction, yet faster. The pandemic is helping consolidate previously apparent trends in political mobilisation of Indian politics. But, there are still barriers to digital communications in India with the highly uneven smartphone penetration of the population. Video conferencing had been widely used in the corporate sectors, but not in politics. Over the last few years, India has seen technological shifts in terms of commerce; likewise, e-commerce provided itself useful amidst the pandemic as shopping habits and consumer behaviour changes rapidly. 
 
This human behaviour of adapting to change quickly and flawlessly as demonstrated by us adjusting to the “new” world is not only prevalent in politics but other major sectors as well, such as education. The pandemic has caused the traditional classrooms to transform into an era of e-learning as several schools adopt e-method and continue to educate young minds as ourselves. 
 
The adoption of smart classrooms by schools in transforming the traditional education system, and this sudden switch is not only limited to private schools but even some government schools. We as students have had to make adjustments, whether in terms of submissions or content learning, as learning has always been in classrooms. Schools are experimenting with a variety of tech such as MS Teams, Google Classrooms, and Zoom. 
 
However, this transition poses its own set of challenges - restrictive interaction between the teacher and the students, and the inequality gap created among the underprivileged who don’t have access to the  internet and e-resources. Nonetheless, amidst the pandemic, e-learning is the most viable growing choice.
 
As the world continues to suffocate with the virus pandemic of COVID-19, the world is going to change in more ways than one, with a transition from human contact  to higher dependencies on technology. This pandemic is an inflection point that has given the old system a huge nudge and a chance to transform. The systems that were already under part-stress from globalization to clusterization, will get newer frameworks which may serve as a new world order – a technologically wired world. As technology has become the forefront of education and jobs, it is subsequently tackling its way into politics and changing the traditional norms of face-to-face meetings.  Personally, I believe that these e-models in various sectors were highly predictable in the foreseeable “pandemic-free” world; the pandemic just sped up this process a few years.