Perception and Digital Media in India

Abstract

This essay analyzes the body politics at the center of both business services outsourcing labor (also termed affective, immaterial, or communicative labor) and the value-adding digital image in contemporary Indian media. The author uses a “media assemblage” method in this analysis, which brings together a critique of emerging forms of communicative labor, digital image technologies, and the changing capacities of the body, or affect. This paper is concept, following the critical approach methodology, and interprets findings rather than predicts them. Numerous feminist investigations analyzing the potentials within what has been designated traditionally as women’s work, have grasped affective labor with terms such as kin work and caring labor. Through an analysis of the Hindi-Bollywood film No Smoking (Kashyap, 2008), and the documentary Office Tigers (Mermin, 2006), the author explores the emergence of a digital vision in the South Asian context through pervasive processes that are “informatizing” various forms of life and work. They correlate the function of this digital vision in both business outsourcing and digital media through analyses of two key modalities: the evolving functionality of information in computer technology; and the modulation of subjectivity in the capacities of attention and sensation of value creation.