Scintillating Silhouettes of Digital Consumerism
Sreetanwi Chakraborty
“The paramount doctrine of the economic and technological euphoria of recent decades has been
that everything depends on innovation. It was understood as desirable, and even necessary, that
we should go on and on from one technological innovation to the next, which would cause the
economy to “grow” and make everything better and better. This of course implied at every point
a hatred of the past, of all things inherited and free. All things superseded in our progress of
innovations, whatever their value might have been, were discounted as of no value at all.”
( Wendel Berry )
I would definitely like to commence this topic with a segment of my personal experience, when I
was loitering inside a grotesquely designed shopping mall in Kokata. Inside a renowned gadget
store I found two women bargaining for a mobile phone. One was referred to as the maidservant
of the household, and the other lady was the employer, an orthopedic surgeon’s wife. The
maidservant wanted a duplicate product, a carbon copy of the same mobile that her ‘madam’ had
just bought. Her enthusiasm was triggered, because that digital thingamajig could allow her to
impress her boyfriend with megapixelled images of her facial and bodily contours, as the mobile
screen could adjust light and shadows in the pictures automatically, and could eradicate physical
anomalies in the photo version to the maximum limit.
A second case also captured my attention, regarding the formidable effects of digital
extravaganza. During the anti-eviction movement on 30th March 2012, in Nonadanga, a place
that had temporary slums and shanties, in Kasba area of Kolkata, the Bartaman (a Bengali
newspaper) reported unimaginable plight of the protesters. One of the female protesters
commented that, she had lost her ‘branded television and mobile set’, and claimed that, more
than anything else this was an irreparable loss to her. In fact, the irreconcilable discrepancy
between those who are having all the facilities in life, and those who are perpetually deprived of
even the basic minimum necessities, is glaring, but consciously and subconsciously, they also
desire for all the advertized, digitalized, and morphed products that can enable them recuperate
from the condition of perennial and sporadic drudgery.
A pertinent question that nudges me at this juncture is that, what is the digital debate all
about? Is it, in any way, trying to subvert all the preconceived notions about the welfare and
lifestyle of these destitute, the lower class women, or, is the digital revolution, in some way,
embarking upon a catastrophic journey to fabricate a world of temporary illusion for them, where
these mason-women, rag-pickers, domestic maidservants, female tea-stall owners, poultry
retainers, tea-garden laborers, municipality scavengers, part-time ‘ayah’s (untrained nursing
helps), milk-maids, and female construction workers are entrapped into the computerized
marketing procedures, billboards with swanky gadgets displayed on them, the spicy concoctions
which promise to make their bland dishes delectable, essentially make them oblivious of the
multiple faces of poverty and the relentless struggle with a drunkard husband, a debauch male
partner, or their sultry afternoons and insipid nights at the red light areas of Kolkata.
Commercial television channels have intrinsically infringed as the by-products and
disseminators of a very complicated concept of modernization and urbanization, and they have
penetrated even the remotest parts of West Bengal and other surrounding areas. The behavioral
patterns, psychological framework and the idea about their own ‘body’ have inculcated in these
lower class women, an urge to have the most glistening of all beauty products, fairness creams
that will boost their confidence and somehow allow them to progress a step further in the social
hierarchy and ‘look’ like the middle class, well-to-do females. Images used in print media,
magazine covers, advertisement of multinational products, and a complete flourishing of
technology and scientific innovations have created a hyper-real world for these women, who fail
to differentiate between the glittering tinsel world, and the position they occupy in the overall
social structure.
If we scrutinize the temporary consequences, as well as the concrete impact of the digital
or the cyber cataclysm on Kolkata’s culture of servitude, it is revealed that, although the
maidservants, domestic workers, and part time or full time helpers are considered to be an
integral part of the ‘bhadralok’( a parochial view of part of the educated middle class Bengali
people), disparities still remain, and Indrani Sen has contemplated in her book Are You Being
Served that the television and ultramodern marketing strategies have almost blurred the
distinction between the employers and the employed, where, even if the actual picture remains
the archetypal- they eat, but only after we have finished our food, they also participate in our
family drama, although they are relegated to the role of bit players. For recognizing one aspect of
the digital deliberations, it can be said that, for these women who generally belong to the
marginal, non-advantaged positions of the society, the irresistible temptation of a luxurious
lifestyle, computer, internet, laptops, tablets, wi-fi connectivity, motorcycles, lipsticks, LCDs,
LEDs, data cards, supersonic channel loaders, computer courses, and even getting admitted in
some discounted spoken English lessons at the end of their daily activities, in reality, portray the
unmitigated onslaught of the frantic fatality of globalization and digital excess, and how these
women remain vulnerable to these. The digital flirtations emphasize not just a spatial or temporal
shift for these women whose roles have been traditionally selected, codified, structured and
socially demarcated as less significant or mediocre, or secondary among the more educated,
privileged or economically solvent females, but a conspicuous truth is also laid bare about their
newly-achieved positions. The incessant dichotomy between the ‘central’ and ‘peripheral’ space
which these women occupy, and the whirlpool of numerous complexities that affect these
women, is really to be examined by us, before we usher in another grand celebration of the
National Women’s Day this year. The valorizing of unprecedented digital connectivity and
networking destabilizes and reprimands the social disparities among these subordinate class
workers who actually create and recreate, capture and recapture their moulded ‘images’ as they
wanted them to be. To present themselves in shades of shimmering pink photo-arts, to wrap their
discomfitures in marvelous salwar suits (although, for most of the domestic staffs, they come as
second-hand, used material from their employers!) is an extraordinary achievement for them.
Their physical, mental scars, all of their social aberrations are then teased at, and finally
devoured by the more rhythmic inclusion and tempo of the new cyber mania, recorded and
transmitted through money, a new wave of collective Capitalism where the binaries of deformity
no longer exist, but a promotional courage ratify these women to be in their new ‘avatar’s, in
semblance with the larger circle of others.
‘The effects of technology’, in the words of the perceptive media theorist Harbert
McLuhan, ‘do not occur at the levels of opinions or concepts’, rather, they transform patterns of
perception. Rampant usage of digital equipments, and a constant obsession with digital facts,
figures, pictures and contents actually paralyze the life of either Rowma, or Sushma, or Fulki, or
Tiya, as they wait, want and long to be ‘seen’, to be visualized as the members of the same
planet to which their employers, or the children of their employers belong. Rapid and
autonomous access to education, social networking sites, communication groups, pen-friend
circle, business advertisements, e-banking, commercialization of the realty firms, estate building
layouts with swimming pools, Jacuzzi, joggers’ park and mechanized gymnasiums, database
available in call centres, the association with what have erstwhile been considered as the ‘finer’
things of life, have all catapulted these women not only to an economically superior position,
than those who just live the BPL lives in rural villages, or even, their own housemates, sister-inlaws, other female friends, or co-passengers in train. In her celebrated book Zeroes and Ones
Sadie Plant expresses eloquently how the cyberspace acts as a liberating zone for the women,
and she thinks the textual nature of the internet lends itself to ‘the female’. Her adroit portrayal
of the ‘zeroes’ as females and the ‘ones’ as phallic and male, predicts that the digital future can
be said to be feminine, distributed, non-linear, an innovative world order where the phallic ones
are displaced by the zeroes. Plant in this connection can be considered one of the leading
harbingers of cyberfeminism, thwarting the previous conceptions of technology as essentially
masculine.
Everyday, in local trains that connect Sealdah to Dankuni, or Howrah to Bandel, or Shalimar
station to some other unknown, less remarkable, prehistoric places, we see women jostling in
crowded compartments of the ‘vendor’ class; women travelling by train, commuting from
obscure villages near Lakshmikantapur, or Taki, Hasnabad, Karimpur, or Sandeshkhali, not just
to earn a decent livelihood, but also to include themselves in the tantalizing world of the city;
they are found staring vacantly at what the fashionable car showrooms or the glistening façade of
a branded garment store has to offer, considering the ‘digital’ images, style sheets, labeling,
pixelled beauty, conglomeration of perfect, size-zero models as the basic parameters of rising in
a social hierarchy, thus making it quite obvious that digital consumerism has overpowered them
completely. It is a slice of my thought, that, whereas railways connected the suburbs to the
metropolitan cities, they have also become sites for the perpetuation and regeneration of social
evils like child trafficking, molestation, drug-peddling, prostitution and other sorts of anti-social
activity. The number of escort services, call girls, phone and get a friend who will satisfy all your
needs, and sophisticated massage parlours that have mushroomed all over the suburban areas like
New Barrackpore, Ashokenagar or Habra ( and not forgetting our very own Kolkata!) have been
instrumental in aggravating and nurturing these social evils and facilitation of sex over, via and
through internet, wi-fi, cheap mobile marketing and attraction of money and long-term fixed
deposits. The images of several girls have been distorted, re-configured, re-textured, morphed
and drastically changed and circulated in obscene websites. On a microscopic level, it was also
understood, as different newspapers generated facts that many of the girls work as part-time call
girls only to receive some extra money, and work either in a tea-stall, or as a maidservant, or in a
construction site thrice a week, or a flower-seller, or a vegetable-vendor. They justify their acts,
disregarding any sort of flippant moral scruples that all good girls or women of the society are
endowed with. They are just like the college students, or any other woman on the street. Unlike
the stereotypical prostitutes on the streets, they feel liberated; they are vociferous about their
personal sexual choices, they can ‘edit’, ‘select’, ‘control’, ‘delete’, or ‘alter’ their clients, after
entering the business by placing their own computerized advertisements on public classified
sites, and often keeping the work a strict hush hush to their families. At this point I found it
relevant to concentrate on what Scott Cunningham, an economist at Baylor University, who has
studied the impact of internet on prostitution markets, has said: “When you take the profile of
internet prostitutes versus street prostitutes, you find there’s more education and that more work
temporarily, and then exit. They also are significantly less likely to work for a pimp”. But the
question still hovers around – does the digital debate has only positive ramifications, or, is it, in
essence, trying to suppress and objectify simultaneously, the feminine self, the pivotal role of
these females in the society.
As for my personal experience with a woman, about thirty-five year old, who works as a
maidservant in one of the most affluent areas of Ekdalia, in South Kolkata, her life was not so
smooth even after all the grotesque humour that digital market had to offer her. She actually
participated in a dual income activity circle, she had been married off to a carpenter of
‘Bongaon’ at a very early age, she became vulnerable to the sordid miscalculations of pregnancy,
as well as social and cultural atrocities like domestic violence, as well as several oppressions in
the house of her employer. The person whom once she fondly called ‘dada’ (elder brother) had
forced her into distorted sex performance (which is prohibited by the Indian Penal Code),
photographed her naked with his own self, morphed her pictures, deleted his own from those,
and circulated these on social media and pornographic sites. Incidentally, this man was also a
computer engineer and he had made an unproductive use of the digital dexterity. Thus, a
sufficient technological knowledge on the part of the man actually placed him in a superior
position when compared to the utter ignorance of the woman in economic, political, social,
technological, and educational matters. Several cases have been registered both with Kolkata as
well as Barasat and the entire West Bengal police, where digital crime records have soared
beyond imagination, where school drop-out girls, farmers’ wives, brick-kiln labourers, detergent
industry workers( female) are either tempted to experience a pre-nuptial carnal pleasure with
their prospective grooms, who relish a one-night stand with their girlfriends, and then either rape
them, or engage them in flesh-trafficking, or else, channelize, synchronize, and mobilize
distorted images of these girls or women, for a lucrative sum. This in the process defames these
women and mentally paralyzes them beyond any sort of recovery.
Digital insurgency is a continuous process and more than a debate, it can be considered to be an
incredible phenomenon that has multifarious consequences; both the positive and the negative
aspects jostle for identification, and the collective synthesis is almost impossible. What remains
is a fragmented kaleidoscope of azure, white, crimson, magenta, turquoise female faces that
salute the disheveled clouds of modernity and civilization, their hearts pulsating, their nimble
fingers embracing one, two, three, four bit, byte, megabytes and infinity…