Once again, information about Nepal has been misrepresented by a reputed organization. This time it is the famous American space agency NASA, which recently identified a picture of a mountain in the Karakoram Range, located in the Kashmir province of India, as Mount Everest. This mistake comes at the heels of many such earlier mistakes made by reputed sources regarding Nepal. Just last year, for example, the British Museum was upbraided for identifying northeastern India as the birthplace of Buddha.
Although to err is human, the errors can have unintended consequences when made by trusted sources. Such mistakes soon begin passing for facts, as few would challenge the information coming from a reliable source, especially if they have little knowledge of the issue in the first place. This leads to the question of who owns knowledge. Theoretically, knowledge should be owned by those who live it every day, but that is often not the case. We often look for confirmation from “authentic” sources. The knowledge of maps, locations, and nationalities seems especially vulnerable to this trend.
The state of Palestine, for example, until recently could not be found in any map, even though the residents of Palestine had declared themselves to be a state long ago. In this case, only the knowledge from authentic sources was considered true, and this concentrated the power of granting recognition and deciding upon the issues related to a country’s history, geography, and even identity, in the hands of a few brokers of knowledge. Nepal is no stranger to such misrepresentation of its information, especially regarding its land, borders and history. Examples of misrepresentation have been found in newspapers, textbooks, and even encyclopedias. Nepalis as individuals are constantly having to challenge wrong information in supposedly trusted sources.
Until recently, correcting these mistakes was a tough task. If the mistakes were found in books, curricula, or encyclopedias, for example, the correction could only be made in a new edition— granting that there had been sufficient activism to correct the mistake in the first place—by which time it might be too late. Nebulous ideas will have become entrenched, just because they come from authentic institutions. In the case of NASA’s mistake regarding Mount Everest, the mistake was quickly corrected. This was possible owing to the deluge of protests in electronic media. The advent of electronic media has made it easier to point out, protest, and lobby for changes in responsible sources like NASA or the British Museum. But then electronic media is not without its dark sides.
Sources of knowledge like Wikipedia, which are fast replacing more authentic sources for many who fail to understand the difference between reliable and unreliable sources, are problematic. First of all, many of these sources can be manipulated by users with little information. And then there are private individuals and organizations, which have very little stake in the sensitivity or truth of the issue in question, and yet are important in communicating information. Apple maps, for example, were recently involved in controversies for confusing the nationalities of some contested islands between China and Japan.
The last problem related to misinformation in digital media is the sheer number of sources. There is no way that a single person or organization can monitor all sources, more so in places like Nepal where government websites tend to be repositories of outdated information and are routinely hacked. Constant vigilance, networking, and continuous protests and lobbying are the only ways of combating misrepresentation in all these different forms.
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