Most of us are aware of the four estates. Three of which were coined in post-medieval era France, also known as Ancien Régime, where the “estates of the realm” were demarcated dividing society into three parts. The First Estate being “clergy” consisting of religious men making up a significant part of the political hierarchy.
The Second Estate being “nobility,” consisting of all royal lineage excluding the monarch, who oversaw all estates. The Third Estate belonging to the “commoners” consisted of everyone else. Then came the Fourth Estate, first used albeit debatably by Edmund Burke in 1787 to describe the press.
Thomas Macaulay, I think, best put it in his essay in 1828 titled, “Hallam’s Constitutional History,” where he stated in reference to parliamentary proceedings, “The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm.”
Curiously, Samuel Adams, one of the US founding fathers, once said, “There is nothing so fretting and vexatious, nothing so justly terrible to tyrants, and their tools and abettors, as a free press.” Indeed, that is how powerful the press has been and continues to be in many nations including for a short period in the 90s in our very own Bangladesh.
In Bangladesh, we have a slightly different division to the Estates with the change that the First Estate is the one consisting of “politicians and those in uniform.” The Second Estate being “the clergy,” in our case different religious groups and depending on your interpretation and bias, holding differing amounts of power.
The Third Estate being “us,” the commoners. Note how our position throughout history remains unchanged anywhere in the world. Mostly always oppressed, bound and ruled upon.
Therefore, the Fourth Estate, the press, remains in place but with wisdom from Sam Adams, heavily managed by the First Estate (for our own good and security) and, unlike other nations in the world, very much in equal positioning to the Third Estate, meaning “bound” by invisible shackles for the forthcoming future where “freedom” has a very defined parameter with a set of stringent rules. It is because of that very limitation that the Fourth Estate, even though very much a growing part of our society, all have similar voices with uniform tones in their official output.
Whenever someone breaks the choir pitch, they are either privately reprimanded to correction or demoted from the Estate altogether. Conformity is survival to fight another day to make small victories and baby steps ahead. So it is with the backdrop of a partial failure to function with full freedom from the fourth that a new Estate finds life, called the Fifth Estate.
The Fifth Estate doesn’t really have an established definition and this is partly the reason I find it so mysteriously beautiful. It is loosely defined to consist of a group of people outside the mainstream that have a counter opinion that, in certain instances, is used to organise to bring about considerable change within the policy-making process.
While some assert that the Fifth Estate consists of political pundits and commentators, it is a popularly established fact now that the term more aptly describes “networked individuals” by means of technology, such a weblogs, Facebook or Twitter, who can hold the other estates accountable.
Is the Fifth Estate any good to any of us? There is a lot of debate to that end. Without a doubt it has been hugely influential around the world in recent years, encouraging historical movements, many of which have led to “reactions and corrections, and crackdowns and reversals,” says Ivan Sigal, Executive Director at Global Voices.
He goes on to add, “There is also much debate over whether the Fifth Estate is something to be lauded or feared: On the one hand, it facilitated political uprisings, as in Tunisia and Egypt; on the other hand, those uprisings have led to vigourous and vicious reactions from state power, as in Egypt and Syria.”
In stark contrast it has also served as a fantastic means to organise for philanthropic causes that have led to solutions for a lot of socioeconomic challenges. So to that extent it’s a good thing. In terms of an organising and propaganda tool for terrorists, it’s also been a bad influence which has been significantly problematic to combat and served as a destructive weapon for the villains of the world.
Notwithstanding “Shahbagh,” in my opinion a very poor example of the Fifth Estate’s power, and outrageous commentators in the media of the likes of Mr Farhad Mazhar, who believes it’s okay to promote the message of violence to make a point, Bangladesh’s Fifth Estate is anything but established.
In fact, it lacks the confidence, substance and organising influence compared to our neighbours in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal and is leagues behind the abilities of the same sort of forces around the world.
Those in the Bangladeshi blogosphere who did wield considerable influence have now been brought into line jointly by the First and Second Estates through actions on insignificant players and enactments of the ICT.
Our traditional Estates pretty quickly recognised from examples worldwide that the rise of the Fifth would pose considerable pain to the status quo and therefore didn’t spare time to address and block the rise of this perceived problem.
It remains to be seen whether there will be strong groups from within the Fifth in Bangladesh who will rebel and break through to organise and wield their influence over substantive political and socio-economic policy development going forward.
For the former, we have seen individual breakthroughs, mostly behind masks, everywhere but they haven’t translated into meaningful group action yet and, for the latter, wonderful examples have manifested in social media even though not nationally significant as of yet.
It’s my contention though that it is simply a matter of time, largely promoted by cheap and speedy digitisation (irony behold), that our Fifth Estate, long dormant, will finally find a cause worth the fight and effort that allows us to experience and participate in breaking the shackles to establish a society that we consider to be just and fair.
Let the Estates keep failing our expectations and see where that leads!
