IDENTITY, ALTERITY AND SOCIAL MEDIA

Coercing Silence

Abstract

With the advent of social media and digital imaginaries, the right-wing cultural politics has taken the centre-stage in India's popular imagination. On this digital landscape, images are manipulated to create identities, thereby othering the self and producing alterity. Digital India, which was launched to wire the nation, has paved the way for digital imaginary, and has become a contested site which dominates the public discourse by displaying right-wing political power and a cultural nationalism as defined by groups owing allegiance to the ruling dispensation. Instead of providing an even-playing field for a multiplicity of identities, the digital imaginary has endangered identities. Social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook are used to shame and silence non-conformists to alienate and subjugate, thus othering the self. Within the theoretical framework of discourse analysis, this article examines tweets posted by trolls to name and shame the other to create alterities. Using a case-study of television journalist Rajdeep Sardesai, who for a while quit Twitter owing to attacks on him by trolls, it argues that the online space is a pliable domain on which dominant voices create identities and alterities to suit their agenda. It concludes that images are used to create fake identities along religio-nationalist ideologies, and hate speech and propaganda devices employed to other the self and create alterities.