“Digitally Yours”

For months a morphed image of three wise monkeys– Mizaru, Kikazaru and Iwazaru, has been popping up on my whats-app screen. Pictorially they represent the proverbial pictorial “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil”. What makes it memorable is the presence of a fourth monkey, its eyes glued to a mobile screen, oblivious to the surrounding reality thus hinting at its deep digital allegiance. Digital technology has been known in the West before 2000, however it was only around the turn of the millennium that it made deep inroads into Indian professional and public spheres, revolutionizing and reconfiguring those, creating newer employment opportunities and at the same time retiring many old informal jobs and fostering newer discriminations. While much ink has been spent on analyzing the emergence of a class of techno-elite and India’s progress into a future of digital partnership with leading nations of the world—developments that are undoubtedly momentous;  adequate attention has not been paid till recently in understanding the changing fate of affectual relations courtesy this digital revolution.

With the coming of the digital superstructure, ‘alienation’ in the 21^st century world has arguably taken giant steps and leaped out of its conventional Marxist trappings. Creation of newer marginalities has led to new forms of alienation mostly found on access/non-access to one or more social media platforms.  Thus increasingly, those who do not have access to or voluntary opt out of popular social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat are getting digitally marginalized. It’s a kind of ‘techno-discrimination’ that is being practiced almost universally which perhaps makes access to these websites almost mandatory for the current youth of India or the “Insta-generation”. Incidentally membership to one or all of these sites entails a certain amount of visibility and a public display of emotions. In current times we do not live under any iron curtain reality with interactions and emotions flowing freely without inhibitions. Disparate societies too seem to have come of age. While display and acceptance of affection indicates a less repressed social and community structure, what is of contention is the nature of online ‘commitments’.

Connecting online globally first began with Orkut, which as Shriram Venkatraman points out, was introduced by Google as one of its very first social media platforms available to Indian users. In recent years, substantial research has been conducted on the impact of such networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, You Tube, Instagram etc. on inter-personal communication and behavioural patterns of individual subscribers in a bid to understand the different dimensions of such impact. Andrew Moore in “Facebook and the Liberal Arts” notes how in a major shift from the socializing practices of yester years, such social networking sites “have encouraged people to make their personal photos, religious beliefs, and mobile phone numbers available not just to family and friends but also to co-workers, old elementary school classmates, and even strangers”—-a shift, the author emphasizes, if predicted before 2010 or the year when Facebook surpassed 500million users, would have been termed unrealistic and “hyperbolic”. This inference of Moore based on surveys indicate how transnational citizens are choosing the online horizon to express their private selves as also to reach out to the fellow netizens. Statistics showed Twitter followed the same trend as FB when The Guardian reported that in 2011, it had clocked 100 million active users who post an average of 230 million tweets each day. India also joined the bandwagon and in June 2017, Facebook users in India were found to cross the 240 million mark and The Next Web suggested that active users in India were growing more than twice as fast than in the US. Yet another trend observed by The Next Web was the ‘youth factor’, as in mid- 2017, Facebook users in India were found to be predominantly young, with more than half of them aged below 25 years.

While social media still remains a technological wonder for bringing the world together in a single click, in recent years its shadow sides have started becoming conspicuous. Thus disturbing instances of suicide, stalking, trolling, body shaming, hacking, and even murder have all been linked to the ‘victim’ and the ‘criminal’s’ close association with social network sites as FB –mostly identified as the single most powerful conduit of such acts of transgressions and crime. News of a triple murder in 2017 by a West Bengal native residing in Bhopal and his pathological act of burying his parents and his girlfriend in tombs constructed in his own house seems pertinent to the present discourse. He apparently had six FB profiles through which he could peddle multiple identities and project realities very different from his own, enter into a live-in relationship with a girl only to murder her later. Similar incidents of the youth especially teenagers committing suicide after being rebuked or insulted in virtual ‘affectual’ relationships or suffering from a persistent fear of being ‘exposed’ online surface in national newspapers. Such instances make it evident that the social network users, mostly the youth, are still to figure out full-proof mechanisms to protect their emotional selves against online ‘rejections’ or ‘unlikes’. Recent years have witnessed instances of jilted lovers posting intimate photos of their ex-girlfriends or morphing their photos on FB or Instagram leading to fatal repercussions like suicide.  A trend to publicly exhibit adverse experiences of being shamed or insulted is also on the rise and the ‘victims’ apparently proclaim justice by ending their own lives. The instance of a class XII student in Kolkata posting his last message on FB just before committing suicide in 2017 apparently because he could not endure the insult meted out by his teachers— is a glaring reminder of that trend. While such acts might be dismissed as rare and singular, their recurrence in different forms across India in recent times point to a greater and more deep-seated malaise that plagues today’s youth and young professionals, and the root lies in a persistent fear of non-acceptance or rejection by the society. Significantly ‘society’ in these instances is amorphous and restricted to the ‘friend’ list of the users on FB or twitter and consists of peers, associates and family.

Kaveri Subrahmanyam and Patricia Greenfield in a critical article titled “Online communication and Adolescent Relationships” argue how the young especially the adolescents are increasingly integrating these communication tools into their “offline” worlds thus using the social networking sites to get more information about new entrants in their lives. Such collapsing of the offline and online worlds have had a spiraling impact on the lives and minds of the youth as studies reveal their overwhelming dependence on instant messaging, texting, blogging, watching you tube etc. Trolls have emerged as a major threat to the inclusive image of social networking sites and to such online lifestyle practices. Marina Corinna and Priscilla D.Escartin discuss the different subtexts of online trolling, their target groups being natives of Philippines aged between 15 and 30 years.  Trolling, in their reading is “a specific example of an antisocial or deviant online behavior where the user acts provocatively and violates normative expectations within an online community”. Studies observe that trolls seek to elicit responses from their ‘targets’ and they do so intentionally and repeatedly thus disrupting the rhythm of communication among other online members. Interestingly, behaviour of trolls or the phenomenon of trolling, as analyzed by Corinna and Escartin, remains almost uniform across nations.  In this context, the action of the trolls can thus be read as one of social sanctioning thus upholding a particular undefined ‘standard’ that exclude and limit online presence on platforms that are ironically supposed to be inclusive and non-judgmental.

An urge to feign emotions and tailor actions i.e. projecting a ‘pseudo self’ also marks the users’ involvement with the social media especially the networking sites. The effort to project oneself differently in ways that would draw attention of the online users or of a significant other as also to make it a point of discussion is what arguably triggers such online role-taking that deviates from the expected patterns of social interaction in a platform which, for all means and purposes, is a public domain. In 2015 a Bengali film titled ‘Fakebook’, tried to capture playing out of such multiple selves on the social medium. By exploring the culture of online interaction, it sought to discuss how through several fake Facebook profiles, people initiate discussion with strangers and try to showcase themselves in a favourable light to a wider audience. By delving into themes of love and innocence, it sought to evaluate the currency of true love outside the trappings of such pseudo online projections of the self.

While online communication has indeed turned the world into a global village, online affectual commitments are yet to come of age. Examples demonstrate how relationships or commitments forged online mostly fail to replicate relationships formed outside the virtual domain. As trolling and shaming also continue to be constant companions of such online commitments, we await discovery of such technologies or perhaps those social media etiquettes and understandings that will help an affectual relationship to bloom online, unhindered.

Dr. Somdatta Chakraborty

Senior Adjunct Researcher

Asia in Global Affairs