The study has shown that Indian women spend a significant amount of time and effort to create the perfect profile picture as part of an affective push they feel from their environment.
Author
Benson Rajan, Associate Professor, Jindal School of Journalism & Communication, Sonipat, Haryana, India.
Summary
The Facebook profile picture of an Indian woman has a specific affective turn in a digital environment. The digital life embodies immersions into bits governed by software and accessed through hardware. It is a lifestyle managed and reduced to bits of information that we store and exchange for our virtual existence. The digital space has expanded the range of the body beyond its biological existence. The participation in the virtual gives an openness to the body, where it is not just about what happens to bodies in encounters, but also what can it be made to do in mixed reality.
The digitized curation of a women’s profile picture on social media caters to a culture of absent presence. This chapter engages with the functioning of absent presence in the digital representation of women’s bodies on Facebook in Bangalore.
This explorative study portrays an assemblage of affect and sensory semiotics to explain the affective intensity of sensory mediation online and its interpretation in engaging with the concept of lack (absent) that is surrounded by desire and human representations (presence) (Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Penguin Books, New York, 2009).
Symbolism and its semiotic properties of curation were prioritized as the highest analytical concern for this study on Facebook profile pictures. The study showed that Indian women spend a significant amount of time and effort to create the perfect profile picture as part of an affective push they feel from their environment.
Published in: Ravindran G. (eds) Deleuzian and Guattarian Approaches to Contemporary Communication Cultures in India pp 107-120, Springer, Singapore.
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