E-Paper
Top colleges to face off as HT begins national centenary debate
The Hindustan Times centenary debate will explore social media's impact on youth, featuring top students competing for national recognition and addressing pressing concerns.
How pivotal is social media to young people? In what way is it shaping their minds and thoughts? And is this generation, the social media generation, more lost than found?
These questions will swirl around the stage at the Hindustan Times centenary debate that will kick off on Tuesday morning at Delhi’s Bikaner House.
Students from the Capital’s top colleges will compete against each other in the first of the regional rounds; the laurels on offer will range from being crowned the best speakers in the city and a chance to square off against the brightest debaters from across the country for the prestigious national crown.
At stake will be bragging rights and the chance to hold forth on a platform that was not only inaugurated by Mahatma Gandhi but also just completed its 100th year. And there will be prizes to add to the shimmer.
The debate, which will be held across India’s biggest cities over the next few months before culminating in a battle of India’s top speakers next year on the national stage, will commemorate the journey of Hindustan Times, which turned 100 on Sunday.
This journey spans a century and straddles an extraordinary range – from a small band of men and women braving brutal colonial censorship laws to stoke the embers of freedom in the hearts of Indians, to a globally respected voice chronicling the churn in the world’s most populous nation.
Over the years, this paper has acted as a mirror to India and offered its platform to great thinkers and leaders – Martin Luther King Jr, C Rajagopalachari, Rajendra Prasad, Eleanor Roosevelt, MS Swaminathan and Sachin Tendulkar among them. It has blossomed from a circulation of merely 20 copies to becoming one of the most widely read papers in the country, reaching 73 million people every month.
The debate on Tuesday will come against the backdrop of a fractious global debate on the impact of social media on young people, especially the potential effect of prolonged exposure to such content. Since the turn of the millennium, social media has transformed the ways in which the world interacts, changed information consumption patterns and shrunk attention spans. It has brought the globe together, made conversation breezy, and acted as a melting pot of thought and ideas.
But at the same time, governments and regulatory bodies are grappling with its adverse fallout, including bullying of minors, crime, the proliferation of thought silos and the mushrooming of fake news. Conversations around regulation and managing the impact of social media on young people is still nascent, even as its harms become more apparent.
What can governments do? Do ordinary people have a role to play in this? Is regulation at all possible? Or can it curtail free speech? These questions, and more, will be put to the test on Tuesday morning, as young India rises to respond.
