The digital space is essentially a space of erasure by dead information. It seems to be a particular condition of the digital space that it takes up specific information patterns and mines them for details, stores all the different parameters, creates overwhelming streams of circulation, makes archives of ever-growing intensity, and then makes that information dead. Not death by silence or destruction, but merely by overproducing it, giving it extraordinary visibility, depleting all intensity, and then, flattening it as an individual case rather than the symptom of a larger problem. Ironically, the machine built for pattern recognition refuses to identify the patterns of gendered information being erased and diminished by the same actors surprising us by doing the same things each time. By the time this writing is out, the attention of the news cycle will have shifted, and the world will have moved on. The information about the #Hathras case will be another information stream that is archived. The internet will not connect it to the umpteen cases that we have digitally dramatised over the last decades. We will all be surprised again when old information will surface again, when another body, marked by gender, sexuality, and caste, will resurface on a hashtag.
Nishant Shah, 'How social media kills information by overproducing it', Indian Express