3 - Fair Is Lovely; Boys Will Be Boys: Notes on Gender, Class, and Technologies

Summary

Abstract This chapter documents how children negotiated with the gender-based norms in engaging with digital technologies. They used two negotiation strategies to navigate the gender-constraints imposed on their digital engagements: 1) producing glamour and 2) enacting and experiencing privacy. The chapter begins with a description of the first thematic category: glamour. Poor children in Indian slums perceived digital technologies as channels for fulfilling their aspirations, especially upward class mobility. To unpack the second negotiation strategy i.e., privacy, I complicate the dominant understanding of digital users’ right to privacy by demonstrating that privacy is a gendered, classed, and culturally distinct concept. Children's definition and practice of digital privacy bore witness to the influence of patriarchy and misogyny dominant in their communities.

Keywords: glamour, digital privacy, upward class mobility, surveillance, public, confession

Manufacturing Online Identities

Thrift (2008) defines glamour as the industrial production of a sense of fascination with digital technologies. The fascination for digital technologies is tied to the discourse that digital technologies can revolutionise living conditions and alter the material realities of the users. Similarly, Gundle and Castelli (2006) define glamour as an outcome of modernist thought, arguing that the concept has antecedents in capitalist logic. I extend this conceptualisation and propose that glamour allows users to compensate for the “lack” in their lives resulting from the socio-economic and cultural constraints they face. The glamour of digital technologies grants the users liminal access to experiences they aspire to participate in, thus making them increasingly aware of the existing constraints and scarcity in their material worlds. I have categorised children's perception of the glamour of digital technologies under two themes. First, children believed they would experience upward social mobility through the online identities and networks they cultivated. In other words, children used digital technologies to get a glimpse into middle- and upper-class lives. Still, they could not translate these virtual experiences into material reality. Second, children used digital technologies to create glamorous online profiles and networks mimicking the realities of middle- and high-income people. Though children used digital technologies to give others an illusion of their glamour, the glamour was manufactured online and rarely helped them acquire upward class mobility.