[ Prem Taba ]
The violent upheaval that engulfed Nepal on Monday, resulting in 19 deaths and the resignation of home minister Ramesh Lekhak, offers a compelling case study for understanding media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s prophetic insights about media, technology, and social transformation. While the immediate trigger was the government’s ban on 26 unregistered social media platforms including Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and YouTube, a McLuhanesque analysis reveals how digital media has fundamentally altered the relationship between citizens and state power.
McLuhan’s foundational assertion that “the medium is the message” finds its most dramatic validation in Nepal’s recent crisis. The protests were not merely about access to information or entertainment content, but about the sudden amputation of what McLuhan would recognize as extensions of the human nervous system. For Nepal’s Gen Z population, these platforms had become prosthetic extensions of memory, communication, and economic activity.
This technological amputation, however, cannot be understood solely through the lens of digital rights activism. In the weeks preceding the ban, Nepali youths had been increasingly vocal on social media about systemic corruption, using hashtags like #nepokid and #nepobaby to highlight how children of politicians and celebrities are securing jobs and benefits while ordinary citizens struggle for basic necessities. The digital platforms served not merely as communication tools but as pressure release valves for a society frustrated with governmental incompetence and graft. When the government removed these outlets, accumulated social pressure erupted with unprecedented violence, with protesters adopting the slogan ‘Youths against corruption’ – revealing that the social media ban had become a trigger for deeper grievances about Nepal’s endemic corruption and economic inequality.
Building on this foundation of digital activism against corruption, McLuhan’s concept of the “global village” takes on particular significance in understanding how local Nepali grievances intersect with global digital infrastructure. The banned platforms had created what we might call “glocal spaces” – environments where local economic actors could participate in global digital economies while maintaining cultural specificity. Content creators, influencers, and small business owners had developed hybrid identities that were simultaneously deeply Nepali and thoroughly globalized. The government’s attempt to severe these connections revealed a profound misunderstanding of how digital media had restructured Nepal’s social fabric.
Given this context of deep-seated frustration with nepotism and corruption, the theoretical framework of ‘hot’ versus ‘cool’ media provides additional analytical leverage. McLuhan categorized media based on their participatory requirements – hot media like television and radio demand minimal user engagement, while cool media like telephones and, by extension, social media platforms require high user participation. The Nepali government’s assumption that it could substitute interactive, participatory digital platforms with traditional broadcast-style government communication channels demonstrates a catastrophic misreading of media ecology. Cool media create what McLuhan called “tribal” patterns of engagement -intensive, participatory, and emotionally charged.
This governmental miscalculation became evident in both the speed of their capitulation – lifting the ban within days of the deadly protests – and home minister Lekhak’s resignation “on moral grounds” following the death of 19 protesters, revealing the government’s complete underestimation of how deeply these platforms had become integrated into Nepali social and economic life.
The ‘Youths against corruption’ slogan that emerged during the protests crystallizes how anti-corruption sentiment converged with digital rights activism. The social media platforms provided not just communication infrastructure but cognitive and emotional scaffolding for processing and expressing political discontent. When this infrastructure was removed, the accumulated frustrations with governmental corruption and incompetence erupted into the streets.
Nepal’s digital uprising ultimately validates McLuhan’s most prescient observation: “We shape our tools, and thereafter they shape us.” The Nepali government discovered, at the cost of 19 lives, that social media platforms have transcended their instrumental function to become fundamental extensions of human social and economic life. The attempt to regulate these platforms as external objects rather than internal extensions precipitated a social trauma that found expression through physical violence.
This case study suggests that future media regulation must grapple seriously with McLuhan’s insights about technological extension and social transformation. In our hyperconnected age, the medium truly has become the message, and attempts to control the medium without understanding its role as human extension will likely generate increasingly violent forms of social resistance. The Nepal crisis offers a sobering preview of what happens when governments attempt to disconnect citizens from the digital extensions of their social and economic lives. (The writer is an independent media scholar and can be contacted at prem.taba@rgu.ac.in)
