Opinion: Poonam Pandey's Stunt - Why Are We So Upset, Really?

Why are we upset at Poonam Pandey pulling off her death stunt to raise awareness for cervical cancer? 

We, the regular individuals, who thrive on the attention we receive on social media. 

We, the 'mainstream media', that likes to pay more attention to various social media platforms for stories instead of getting boots on the ground. It's cheaper. Simple.

We, the influencers, who have turned attention into our business model.

This cascade of attention around Poonam Pandey's death only irks us because 'we' the smart ones, the know-it-all denizens of the digital universe are brought to face our fallibility. We are very easy to fool. And when we are fooled, we don't like it. And when we are fooled by someone lower in our imagined hierarchy - intellectual, popular, social - it irks us more because it's also humiliating.

Poonam Pandey and the team behind her death rumours that turned out to be fake the next day deserve accolades for utilising the unique affordance of social media to their benefit. Affordance is a 1979 concept that defines possibilities offered by the elements of a particular environment or setting. The affordance in question here is attention.

Social movements thrive on attention. Scholars like William A. Gamson and Gadi Wolfsfeld, see media and movements as "interacting systems". Simply put, while on the one hand, media attention or the lack of it towards a movement is informed by bias, it also shapes the movement on the other hand. Poonam Pandey knows this well. She is no stranger to attention and does not feel embarrassed about using it. Pandey is also aware of the transient nature of media attention - here today, gone tomorrow. Like media scholars, she understands the 'cascading' nature of media attention. She knows that media outlets compete fiercely for 'breaking' stories to survive in a capitalist system. Breaking is followed by "hot" takes. Search engines stay hot with keywords until the next 'breaking'.

Any press is good press. Bad press is especially good press and not only because of the cringe economy. A negative representation in one media outlet often inspires ideologically opposed outlets to go all guns blazing in defence in an attempt to do a 'counter'.

All of us have seen it all. Poonam Pandey just chose to put it to good use. Many are slamming her for appropriating cancer for self-promotion. Seriously? With more than a million followers each on X and Instagram, self-promotion is probably not what she's going for. The shock value of this 'stunt' is so high that self-promotion is a very low payoff.

Pandey has pulled off a successful Brechtian agitprop. Her act received attention because the media has been constantly giving her attention for a while now. It's the rich-get-richer process at work here, too. The news of her death from cervical cancer did impact the search volume for cervical cancer on the internet. Her grand reveal statement about the preventability of cervical cancer is correct, too. 

Pandey's campaign may appear to be off-colour to a lot of people. But the canon of taste is a characteristic of hierarchy. Despite its claims of democratisation, social media is highly stratified with its distinct elite class. Media and social media platforms are social systems and all the interactions here need to be viewed through economic, political and cultural lenses. Tastes differ and there cannot be any absolutism around them. As far as the issue of trivialising a deadly disease is concerned, endless debate can ensue on the various licenses used by different people on an everyday basis on media and social media platforms.

Pandey has received flak for attention-seeking in the past. The very irony of this is implicit in the literary definition of the term FLAK. This German term, part of the WWII military jargon, is an abbreviation for Fliegerabwehrkanone. It means "flyer ward-off cannon" literally, an anti-aircraft gun. The Nazis popularised the usage of the term flak. The one receiving flak and the one giving flak, therefore, are playing the same game. Poonam Pandey is no worse than those attacking her on social media platforms. Maybe a lot of us are just jealous of what she has and we don't!

For the sake of spelling it clearly: this essay is not about attacking or defending Poonam Pandey and her 'stunt'. It is about locating them in a context, assessing them, and drawing lessons from the said assessments. A mere act-outrage cycle does nothing in the absence of such assessments and we go round the prickly pear. Another act, another outrage.

In Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, Alice is told by the Red Queen "Here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place."

(Nishtha Gautam is a Delhi-based author and academic.)

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author.