With the advent of the digital age and online networks, a new facet of human experience materialised called the cyberspace. In other words, it is an addition to an individual’s intrapsychic world. Millions of people are using the Internet as a day-to-day activity to enhance their lives while at the same time there are people who are using it for anti-social purposes such as stalking, harassing, bullying and so on. This, with the advent of the Internet, has become a new weapon of abuse. This research intends to bring the two realms of virtual and physical, which are considered as binaries into a productive dialogue on violence against women. In doing so, it takes forward the narratives of cyber violence survivors into rethinking the construction of disembodied and embodied violence. I pursue this aim by exploring how women survivors of India conceptualise and respond to cyber violence. This is a qualitative exploratory study located within the theoretical framework of feminist standpoint theory in order to engage each survivor’s story from their individual standpoint. An in-depth interview was conducted for 30 women survivors in India. This study will help to critically understand cyber violence as an embodied experience.
This paper reports on a study of the impact of extensive reading (ER) on the language proficiency of a group of Vietnamese government officials studying English. Two questions were of interest. First, we wanted to examine if ER could be successfully implemented with older adult second language learners. Secondly, we were interested in the relationship between learning gain and a set of ER variables, such as amount of ER material read, the extent to which this material was perceived as interesting, easy/difficult, and comprehensible, and whether or not extensive reading was perceived to be a useful and enjoyable activity. The results indicated that older adult ESL learners could indeed benefit from a carefully planned and systematically implemented extensive reading program. Further, a regression analysis showed that amount of ER was the only significant predictor of participants' gain scores.
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to light a crisis of racism and violence on social media by right-wing nationalists in India. Twitter and Instagram have become the online spaces to spew misinformation about the pandemic. Instagram pages such as Hindu_Secret and Hindu_he_hum have been unrelenting and vicious in spreading Islamophobic campaigns using the COVID-19 pandemic. This has opened up opportunities for targeting the Muslim community in India. This study positioned itself within the theoretical framework of Stuart Hall’s encoding and decoding theory to uncover the visual and textual codes used to create stigma and blatant stereotypes that dehumanize and demonize certain communities using social media. This is an explorative inquiry that engaged in a semiotic analysis of the Instagram pages of Hindu_Secret and Hindu_he_hum. The study found encoded stereotypes of threat in the use of colour, religious structures, clothes and other physical markers of cultural identity in generating content for Islamophobia. Coronavirus was portrayed to have Islamic parentage in the memes; thus, it portrayed the Muslim community of nurturing and intentionally spreading the virus across India.
The human-computer interaction works in a Mixed Realty (MR), and the Facebook Profile Picture is one such function of MR (Rajan, 2018). Facebook users engage with profile pictures, which is the first component of a user's Facebook profile. This study shows that millennial women (between the ages of 18 and 25) curate and commodify (Kasch, 2013) their Facebook self-presentations. The aim of these millennial women is to have a unique digital identity by consciously showcasing elements like attractiveness, lifestyle, and clothing through profile pictures. Images are often used for gaining a sense of celebrity status evoked through user's interactions (likes, comments, etc.) with these images. In such social media spaces, women feel pressured to represent themselves as 'hot' or 'sexy' in order to gain attention for the representation of self. Women are also conscious that their images evoke a range of affect amongst their users. This includes feelings of sexual arousal and the users' attempt to communicate this through sexually explicit messages (verbal/visual). Such affect, informed by patriarchy, predetermines the patterns of self-presentation and perception of female bodies (Bordo, 1993). This study uses a combination of in-depth, qualitative interviews and self-assessment survey questionnaires to understand the curation behind the profile picture of millennial women in Bangalore. This study conducted survey of 117 millennial women between 18 and 25 years of age in Bangalore. This paper studies the process behind women's choices of images, the purposes they are consciously aimed at, and the affect-inducing power of engagement anticipated with these images. A modified version of Goffman's (1976) framework of Gendered Advertisements is used to analyze millennial women's Facebook profile pictures. This study observed that women apply elaborate processes to achieve the 'perfect' profile picture. The profile picture serves multiple purpose for the user including the assertion of one's class, commodification of the self and curating the self based on societal expectations. These millennial women were often aware that these images are embedded in patriarchy, and evoke affective response from their users.
An ideological state project of assigning science achievements to that of Hindu mythologies is indirectly undermining democratic structures. Emergence of the fake news phenomenon within the current post-truth era has threatened India's state harmony. From its dominant role in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections to the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, fake news has become a political tool which was misused in both events. One of the major concerns with fake content creation appeared in its use by the central government to disregard science. Political leaders are achieving this by propagating fictional accounts of material inventions from mythological epics like the Mahabharata as the origin for modern scientific inventions like airplanes. Such fake content is part of Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) larger project directed towards creating a Hindu nation. These content are provided virality with the help of social media and online chat platforms like WhatsApp. The chapter tries to locate the role of the instant messaging application WhatsApp in establishing Hindu mythological achievements as the predecessor of modern science in India.
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