“Language exerts hidden power, like a moon on the tides.” – Rita Mae Brown
And what power does language carry? Ever wondered?
Well, in this era of digital technology, the innovators have rightly and clearly understood the hidden power of language i.e power of capturing people’s mind, thus giving a boom to the plethora of social media sharing platforms. Companies are now targeting the viewer’s mind by providing them with the space to share their feelings, opinions and chat with fellow like-minded individuals.
In the same regard, Google’s ‘Year in Search’ report presents a detailed picture of the patterns of India’s internet content consumption. India with over 450 million internet users stands as the second largest online market globally. Looking at the heavy strength of internet users in India, it is certain that online companies cannot afford to leave out Indians from their story. And when it comes to social media sharing platforms, language is the key to success. Therefore we are witnessing the rise of vernacular social media applications such as Sharechat, Dailyhunt, 22 languages, Roposo, etc.
Reasons For The Sharp Rise In Vernacular Language Apps?
1. It gives people a greater sense of connection with other individuals, especially to those who have shifted outside their home region. Strong social bonding has been found to be an important determinant in traversing relations online and offline as well.
2. It allows fellow people to check on local sentiments and get a better insight into the news. Content in local dialects helps in easy understanding as it is within the intellect grasping the power of an individual, especially when they are not well educated.
3. Indian digital story has penetrated well into the tier 2 and tier 3 cities, where English is not yet the common language of masses. For this reason, only, there is an annual increase of 13 percent in Indian language users against a mere 1% growth in English-speaking internet users ( RedSeer Consulting report ). It has been also estimated that Indian language Internet users will grow at a CAGR of 18% against English language users at 3% ( KPMG and Google April 2017 report )
According to the latest Google-KPMG data, 70 % of Indians find local language digital content more reliable. Adding to this, the approximate number of Indian language users online I.e 500 million users, we arrive at the conclusion that a staggering proportion of the population is conversing their emotions and ideas through vernacular languages. It is quite exciting to witness the changing India’s social media scenario where local media players are carving an impressive niche in the digital era of present times.
But even after a great feat of successful start, these apps have been unable to replace non-vernacular media apps. There also stands a number of issues regarding these apps and their usage, which is limiting its growth and reach in Indian technological frame.
Issues Hovering Around These Apps
1. Social media apps like ShareChat see over 800,000 new posts across all languages and regions, and computing this much load of information becomes a cumbersome and complicated task. New technologies like Data science, Machine learning and Artificial intelligence comes into play when there is an increase in the complexity of information, thus requiring additional resources and logistics.
2. Therefore, any form of technology used by regional language social media apps need to learn about users and their content. This calls for roping of content processing pipeline mechanism which includes large scale text processing across multiple regional languages, analysis of images and cross-referencing to the information for better results.
3. Sheer volume of diversity in the nation’s content creates a nightmare in processing such a heavy amount of data in an efficient manner. The cultural and ethnic difference of Indian setup is such that some things accepted traditionally to one section is the blatant abuse or offensive to other section.
As the world witnessed this issue in Myanmar genocide, where Facebook AI was unable to process some Burmese tests leading to the spreading of wrong and fake information. Such failure of content modernisation have evidently proved the inefficiency of such large tech giants, who possesses huge manpower and resources to deal with these issues. Whereas, Vernacular social media apps are still in a growing stage, possessing far fewer employees for specific functions.
4. These vernacular social media apps have been found to provide their “Terms and conditions” agreement in a language other than the vernacular language. Critical and careful observation presents a grim reality of people agreeing to the company demands without their knowledgeable consent.
5. One of the issues with such apps is to understand slang and colloquial context of the region. Integrating these into the library of Machine learning is a tedious task. Local dialects in Indian language setup are very difficult to process because of their variation and different contextual background. Then the recruitment task of such skilled staff well-versed with the local dialect is expensive and time-consuming. Therefore the operational cost of such task overruns the time and cost delays in the company.
Also read: Has Technology Given Humans An Upper Hand At The Cost Of Our Emotions?
6. These vernacular applications carry the loose extent of security features, which makes it easier for notorious elements to circulate sexual and offensive content. The inability to detect such content makes these apps lucrative to online predators for such activities. They target these apps and use their site sharing as a host for spreading fake and false and offensive content.
Apart from these standard issues that are plaguing the success of vernacular apps, there is another major drawback in the sense that its capacity to carry content is still limited and very much in the bounds of the local community. This leaves vernacular applications to look like a mere dwarf against the popular tech giants such as Fb, WhatsApp, etc. And since global media platforms are still carrying the bulk of data in non-vernacular languages, these apps have been finding it hard to integrate the sharing of data.
The future of vernacular social media apps may seem very bright but it still has a long way to go in order to compete with the other social media apps that literally commands a monopoly over online social sharing.