Religious Subjectivities and Digital Collectivities on Social Networking Sites in India

Abstract

This article analyses how the infrastructural architecture of social networking sites (SNS) is conducive to the emergence of religious subjects and digital collectivities. I argue that SNS enable social connections, and subjectivities are created to reify discriminatory religious and political practices and discourses online. This study identifies and responds to three critical arguments about SNS and religious subjectivities. First, it challenges the liberal assumptions that advancement in SNS will lead to the creation of depoliticized and more rational societies. I argue that SNS deepens the already existing social segregations in the society through the creation of digital collectivities. Digital collectivities inform functional possibilities (ontology) and discursive modes (epistemology) of enacting religious subjectivities. These collectivities not only shape the ways in which users articulate their religious and political allegiance but also the content of their online presence. Finally, in unpacking the formation and existence of digital collectivities and how they are linked with the emergence of religious subjects, I examine the question of digital ontology—the debate regarding what a religious subject on SNS is and of epistemology—how is a religious subject defined.

Keywords

Social networking sites religious subjectivity digital collectivities ontology and epistemology online cultures abuse trolls

In his essay ‘Populist Publics’, Cody (2015) argues that classical-liberal theories of public sphere are both utopian and disembodied.² Theories and practices of public sphere presuppose a certain kind of personhood, which is rational and logical. Participation in the liberal public sphere demands that people bracket their personal commitments, idiosyncratic particularities and private interests to prioritize rational public goals and debates. This is called the art of ‘self-abstraction’.

Publicity compels participants of the liberal public sphere to assume an indifference to their gender, caste, class, racial and other social identities and to detach themselves from their personal experiences and lived realities. Theoretical boundaries of these liberal discourses of public sphere fail to acknowledge how material conditions and lived experiences of people who are socialized as religious-gendered-caste-class subjects inform their participation in public life. The principle of self-abstraction animates a logic of exclusion at the core of liberal theories of public sphere.

Within this understanding of the public sphere, everyone who fails to imagine oneself as unaffected by social identities such as gender, caste, class, religion and race is supposed to have no participation in the formation of the public opinion. The alternative conceptualizations of ‘counter publics’ (Fraser, 1990) are also critiqued (Warner, 2002) on the grounds that these account of participation of minoritized groups continue to deploy disembodied rational deliberation—mimicking the dominant publics they intend to challenge.

Cody encourages us to conceptualize critical theories of embodied public spheres that do not presuppose the dominance of liberal assumptions in publicity and public opinion (2015, p. 59). The first step on this path of critical enquiry is to acknowledge that those who have the privilege to occupy a depersonalized and unmarked space of rational participation are a minority. In India, only a small portion of upper caste-class Hindus can assume this unmarked space through self-abstraction. These liberal minorities are increasingly challenged by larger groups of social classes who are more interested in practicing their religious, caste, gender and other social identities and in forming alliances based on either shared experience of discrimination or collective aspiration of solidarity. These non-liberal ‘new middle classes’ (Chatterjee, 2004; Fernandes & Heller, 2006) continue to build political mobilization around collective identities (of caste, gender and religion) through platforms of mass mediation and subvert the liberal narratives of publicity and civil society.

Scholars such as Warner (2002), Cody (2019), Rajagopal (2010), Gittinger (2018) and others critique the liberal theories of public sphere on the grounds that these classical conceptualizations overstate the unifying capacity of mass media technologies. Habermas’ discussion of the public sphere examines the innate links between the burgeoning newspaper and media industry in the eighteenth century and the foundations of a democratic society (1991, p. 88). The argument emphasizing that an increase in the accessibility of reading technologies led to the emergence of ‘reading publics’ implies that technologies of mass mediation enable people to prioritize rational thinking in public debates/consensus building. To critique this, it is essential to bring into discussion the theories proposed by scholars such as Anderson (1983), Appadurai (1996), Gupta (2005) and Orsini (2002), emphasizing how the proliferation of capitalist mass mediation is concomitant with either the emergence of new forms of political contention and cultural fragmentation or the reification of the already existing communal fractures in the society. For instance, in his book, Politics after Television, Rajagopal (2010) explains how new forms of mass mediation technologies caused the anticolonial nationalist utopia to transform into different forms of political aspirations and practices. This is obvious in the ways the discourse on nationalism in secular India is conflated with the Hindu religious ideology.

If previous mass mediation technologies such as newspapers and televisions complicated our understanding of publicity and embodied participation in the public sphere, the internet introduces more challenges. Unpacking the ways in which religious ideologies transitioned from offline to online sites, Dawson and Cowan (2004, p. 2) draw attention to two types of crisis, that is, the crisis of authority and authenticity. According to Dawson, a crisis of authority manifests in three forms: First, everyone has access to technologies of content creation and so there is a loss of control over materials, which qualify as religious and/or pertaining to the religious ideology. Second, this process, enables ‘grassroots witnessing’, giving community members more access to techniques and practices of meaning-making. Third, as a result of this, a crisis of authenticity emerges related to both the content/meaning of religious subjectivities (here, far-right Hindutva nationalists) and the online practices developed to enact these.

The informational architecture and technological affordances of SNS provide a site for the convergence of the process of mass mediation and collective modes of social life. The liberal theories of public sphere emphasize the significance of the concept of ‘stranger sociability’ through mass mediation processes for the effective functioning of the public sphere. For example, Tarde (2010, p. 278) differentiates publics from crowd; crowds are often considered as less democratic and immensely irrational on the basis that they act out of emotions and lack the capacity to enact self-abstraction. Tarde proposes that each public is a potential crowd and may cause ruptures in a rational public sphere. This argument is flawed in that it presupposes a ‘logical reading public’ created through the proliferation of mass media technologies. To unpack this argument further, I draw from the theory of ‘split public’ and highlight the existing dissonance between liberal theories that emphasis on the potential of media technologies to unify disparate audiences and the realities of collective modes of social life formed around social identities.

For example, the SNS offer multiple modes of participation, enabling people to replicate their religious affiliations online. Their politico-religious subjectivity emerges as an axis around which they build solidarity, often through practices of reinforcing the discourse on Hindu nationalism. The split public is, therefore, a heuristic that can be deployed to understand an incomplete public sphere and publicity. It helps us reorient our attention to the linkages between the secular expectations of the liberal elites and the historical and embodied forms of subjectivities influencing public discourse in India.

In the following section, I unpack some of these existing schisms around religious and political subjectivities as practiced through online engagements in the Indian digital scape.

Social Networking Sites and the Political Form of Religion

Discourse on secularism in India began with an assumption that the liberal-modernizing practices concomitant with the mechanisms of the secular ideology will limit religion and its articulations and practices to the private sphere. Secularism and the assumptions of a post-religious society are tied with modernist/liberal conceptions about the role and potential of mass mediation technologies in creating rational societies unaffected by social identities and experiences. Scholars such as Mohan (2015), Rajagopal (2010) and Udupa (2019) argue that the proliferation of communication technologies has led to a deepening of the existing communal schism in the country. Mohan (2015) and Udupa (2019) extend this argument to demonstrate that online discursive practices enabled by the technological affordances of SNS reinforce our understanding of political-religious identities as a material condition of being—how is the participation in a politico-religious community articulated and imposed through everyday online discourse. They illustrate how far-right Hindu nationalists in India are deploying the affordances of social media platforms such as Twitter to reify discrimination against gender, caste and religious minorities.

Extending this line of argument, I propose to problematize the assumption that SNS are merely channels of representation designed to circulate meanings and experiences, which are independent of the materiality of the technologies used. To understand how the SNS enable practices, social connections and identities created to reify discriminatory religious and political identities online, I will be asking three critical questions:

How is religion intertwined with questions of politics, that is, the process of religious subjectivation³?

How does religion produce possibilities to re-imagine what sociality in a political society means?

How does religion inhabit and is adapted to architectures of mediation to enable new forms and modes of articulating, practicing and experiencing religious subjectivities?

In engaging with these questions, I argue that the online presence of religious subject must be examined as (a) an ontological category to emphasize how users relate to SNS while performing their religious subjectivity, thereby, giving rise to practices of politico-religious conduct compatible with the information architecture of the SNS and (b) an epistemological category to emphasize the centrality of SNS in understanding how individuals make sense of, give meaning to, and articulate their religious subjectivity.

Online Practices and Discourses of Discrimination

The digital media in India has witnessed a rise in the presence of religious nationalism with people actively practicing their politico-religious ideology, especially evident in the creation and circulation of abusive content towards religious minorities. Online practices and discourse around nationalism in India are often intentionally conflated with religious identities and used as a force field to promote the idea of a ‘Hindu first India’. Many right-wing nationalists use Twitter to articulate the possibility of imagining India as a monolithic Hindu nation, guided by the dictates of the Hindutva⁴ ideology in determining who qualifies as an ‘ideal citizen’ of the country. Accordingly, several religious, caste, class and gender minorities are categorized as outsiders who must be constantly surveilled and disciplined (Anand, 2016).

These recent articulations of exclusionary religious nationalism rely on the technical and discursive possibilities afforded by SNS. Based on a comparative study examining populism in India, United State, China and Sweden, Schroeder argued that ‘digital media have been a necessary precondition for the success of right-wing populist movements, as they allowed circumventing traditional media gatekeepers’ (2018, pp. 56–60). This is evident in the form of abuses and online vitriol used by Hindu nationalists in India to threaten and silence dissent against the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) and to reinforce the Hindutva ideology in the country.

This phenomenon of a rise in populism is shaped by the broader public culture where ‘a society and its constituent individuals and communities imagine, represent, and recognize themselves through political discourse, commercial and cultural expressions, and representations of state and civic organizations’ (Hansen, 1999). The dominant discourse populating the political topography of India is informed by historical texts, myths and other forms of communicative narratives, which reinforce binaries such as us-versus-them, insider-versus-outsider, India-versus-Pakistan and Hindu-versus-Muslims (Bhatia, 2019). This public culture, characterized by animosity among Hindus and Muslims, can be examined at two levels.

First, increasingly authoritarian leadership style and politics has given rise to extremist content, hate speech and a culture of threats and abuse. In India, the BJP has nourished and promoted the Hindutva ideology that focuses on demonizing religious and caste minorities, especially the Muslim community. The party is using and introducing policies, laws and strategies designed to curb dissent—critical voices challenging the discriminatory ideology and practices of the party are surveilled, identified and punished (Chacko, 2018; Chatterji et al., 2019; Gudavarthy, 2020). For instance, the government has used the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), introduced the Data Protection Bill and pressed sedition charges on young citizens protesting government policies, decisions and practices. The government has justified and strengthened the online presence of followers of the Hindutva ideology while at the same time threatening, criminalizing and even arresting those who challenge government’s authority online.

Second, the affordances of SNS are conducive for creating user-generated disinformation and for propaganda to flourish. The computational propaganda project created a country profile for India and demonstrated that the cyber troop capacity of political party actors or government tasked with manipulating public opinion has increased significantly from 2014 to 2019 (Bradshaw & Howard, 2019). This study highlights how user strategies and affordances of SNS such as data analytics, targeted advertisements, bots and others forms of automation on platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter are used to manipulate public opinion on social media. The study also indicates that there were around 300 active workers in 2019 using ‘strategic means to inflame sectarian differences, malign the Muslim minority, and portray Modi as savior of the Hindus’ (Press Trust of India, 2018). The online threats ranged from crude automated abuses to personalized attacks on individuals. Sometimes, this online culture of abuse also manifests in the form of death and rape threats or real-life attacks by trolls. The affordances of SNS allow users to re-narrativize the socio-political realities and generate texts that reinforce their ideology (Sinha, 2017, p. 4172). Though this may lead many to believe that content creation or online archiving is a practice in self-expression, critical civic engagement and collaboration, I argue that SNS users in India are using these affordances to spread rumours, disinformation, propaganda material, hate speech and extremist content—all designed to look like ‘news’ and ‘facts’. According to Bhatia (2020), SNS are often cloaked and support/reward self-expression, even in cases where individuals choose to perform their biases in and through the messages they create and archive.

As a result, SNS should be investigated as both the form and content for the manifestation of digital collectivities with the prime goal of furthering the functional possibilities and discursive modes of enacting religious subjectivities. SNS enable new forms of digital collectivities that entail two simultaneously occurring processes: First, users develop an intimacy with the interface of SNS, and this experience informs not only the form of expressions, that is, how users choose to practice their religion subjectivity, but also the content of this subjectivity. As distinct forms of subjectivity come into being because of the logic of social networking, we are presented with ontological questions related to ways in which users experience their religious subjectivity. In other words, inhabiting SNS changes how we produce political forms of religion—there is a heavy emphasis on the discursive modes of experiencing and participating in digital collectivities. This produces a new imagination of the political and the religious where social media emerges as an ontology of human interaction and experience (Shah, 2017). For instance, online trolls created by various right-wing political actors (Bradshaw & Howard, 2019; Chaturvedi, 2016) dwell in digital networks online. This signals a change from examining SNS as an extension of ourselves to appreciating these as points of origin of our subjectivities. ‘Social media trolls’ is a subjectivity replete with distinct values, knowledge and practices produced, regulated, controlled and surveilled by SNS. SNS is the site for digital collectivities, giving rise to new states of being and sociality.

Second, the experience of inhabiting these digital networks changes the content of religious subjectivities. The content created with the help of SNS renders the politico-religious identities as a collection of technically mediated meanings. Does this change how religious subjectivities are performed in the political milieu of the country? Let us take the example of rumours related to the phenomenon of ‘love-Jihad’ circulated through the SNS. According to scholars such as Siddiqui (2018) and Udupa et al. (2020), rumours designed to initiate communal conflicts imbibe the technical affordance of immediacy within the content curated and have the potential to translate into situations of conflict which escalate easily. Cody (2019) also emphasizes that these instances of organized hatred have relied heavily on the infrastructural affordances of SNS. SNS shape the condition and content for religious subjectivities to extend through time and space as political forms of religion are actualized in digital networks.

SNS and Digital Collectivities

SNS constitute a space in time where religious communities and individuals imagine and define their association with one another based on how their religious subjectivities are interwoven with their political aspirations and practices. These online practices and discourses take material form and manifest in the emergence of digital collectivities. Digital collectivities comprise of connections between individuals who identify their religious subjectivities as the common means of association among them. Within their SNS, people imagine their existence in relation to how they associate and engage with others, and how they collaboratively define norms of socio-political conduct. In an ethnographic study conducted in Tamil Nadu, Cody (2019) tried to examine how caste identities served as an axis to organize as a digital collectivity over WhatsApp. This has given rise to a ‘new form of public hate’ immanent as both discursive and physical violence against Dalits in the state. Such digital collectivities have three critical characteristics.

Digital Collectivities Are Dynamic

Digital collectivities are not static or permanent and have no fixed boundaries. Digital collectivities exist as a discursive site, continually re-organized within a dense network of discursive and technical practices. For instance, Udupa (2016) conducted a digital ethnography to understand how users inhabit social media networks as they perform their religious and/or political identities. She argues that as individuals inhabit these collectivities, they also change the very nature of the digital networks through both technical and discursive means. Individuals who constitute these digital collectivities spend a lot of time controlling the affordances of SNS and creating content to thrive (as religious subjects). When they change the features of SNS by the virtue of modifying network settings, they are, in essence, imagining their social existence into being through technical practices. These include practices such as controlling who has access to these collectivities, that is, is it an open or closed network, regulating what is shared, created and circulated with regard to the format and content of the message, how and which types of participation are normativized through common practices, and finally how is the aberration to the norm disciplined (by technical processes such as blocking some digital profiles or discursive mechanism of reprimanding and/or trolling the aberrant).

The concept of digital collectivities as dynamic entities is crucial to my analysis because the practice of enacting and experiencing religious subjectivities on SNS is precariously situated between the discursive and material elements of SNS. It is a critique of the very argument that SNS are merely a channel, that is, a technical tool to further corporeal subjectivities. When people practice exclusive politics while enacting their religious subjectivity, they use the technical affordances of SNS to exclude, discriminate, abuse and discipline the other. They implement the core affordances to change the technical space of SNS, that is, its ontology, such that discursive engagements ensuing in these digital collectivities enable the enactment of their religious subjectivity.

Digital Collectivities Assume Rationale of Liberal Polity

Digital collectivities harness the technical potential of SNS and bear the mark of a commitment to some version of liberal polity in which all ideas can circulate and thrive. Scholars such as Castells (2010), Boltanski and Chiapello (2011) and Brownlow and O’Dell (2002) argue that the emergence of SNS necessitates new ways of examining and engaging with the public sphere. As SNS are crowded with multiple voices and practices, the authority to control, create and regulate is fragmented and contained within several digital nodes. In these circumstances, the assumedly rational public sphere informed by the bourgeois values of logic, rationality and scientific temperament is destabilized as individuals inhabit and reconfigure these spaces to enact their religious subjectivities. According to Bhatia (2019, 2020) critical investigation of how individuals inhabit SNS as religious subjects in India yield empirical findings that are antithetical to the dominant argument by some internet scholars that digital networks are embedded in a commitment to openness and promote the liberal idea that in a democratic society, where all ideas can circulate freely, the best ideas will win (Mill, 1859). SNS embody the material and discursive contradictions of a liberal and democratic public sphere witnessed in the presumptive authority of affect and the tension between ethics and the power of algorithms.

Studies designed to examine how individuals situate themselves within SNS as religious subjects with determinate political ends emphasize that online platforms promise a site where user-generated content can challenge the authenticity of mainstream narratives authorized by secular institutions of governance (Rajagopal, 2016; Sinha, 2017; Udupa, 2016). As a result, instead of creating more inclusive narratives, SNS are used to create content that reinforces the already existing communal fractures in the Indian society.

Digital Collectives Are Affect-based

Digital collectivities thrive as affect relations continuously reconfigured across time and space through networks, connections, communications and affordances. In this, subjectivities are not a priori—they are a product of the ‘regimes of circulation’ (Cody, 2009). In the age of big data and digital networks, our religious subjectivities are constantly being reassembled as new meanings and experiences (of performing religious subjectivities) emerge (Kelty, 2017). In other words, individuals may identify as Hindus/Muslims in lived realities but when they inhabit digital networks, they encounter a different informational architecture, which informs their experiences as religious subjects. For instance, individuals may not enact violence against the religious other in offline spaces, but as participants of digital collectivities they may be more inclined to practice discursive violence against the religious other either with the help of technical affordances such as blocking-excluding people with a different religious ideology and/or performing discursive violence by trolling, cyber-bullying, abusing and harassing the other. A distinct religious subjectivity, therefore, emerges within SNS that people occupy.

Collectivities are a theoretical invocation to mark out the tension between the lived, affective, corporeal dimensions of public-political life and the endorsement of the rationally regimented technical characteristics of social institutions and systems of governance (Mazzarella, 2019; Santner, 2016). I want to locate the idea of collectivities in my investigation on how religious subjects emerge from and inhabit SNS for two critical reasons.

First, the political topography of India is characterized by the dominant discourse of religious discrimination, especially among the Hindu and Muslim communities in the country (Nussbaum, 2007; Sud, 2012; Yagnik & Seth, 2004). This political space extends to occupy digital networks of mediation and circulation, thus enabling individuals to create and sustain virtual spaces for experiencing and articulating their religious and political identities (Chopra, 2006; Gittinger, 2018). Scholars such as Banaji (2018) and Chaturvedi (2016) argue that the country and people are witnessing, to a large extent, a populist wave of a Manichean division of the population into a valorized majority (Hindus) and a demonized minority (Muslims). On SNS, this populist wave manifests as an affect-intensive practicing of the us-versus-them binary.

Digital collectivities are indicative of ways in which individuals harness the potential of SNS to usher in modernity and use decentralized systems of circulation/mediation to demystify our fantasy of post-religious/secular country (Chatterjee, 2001). According to Rajagopal (2010), this is the phenomenon of a split public wherein ‘the expansion of the media doesn’t result in greater social unity so much as in greater visibility for existing social division’ (p. 54).

The concept of digital collectivities can be used to study the phenomenon of the collapse of a modernist-liberal hegemony along with its technocratic-rational communication hubris. The SNS is constituted of precarious religious subjectivities located within systems and practices of social segregation in the country. Digital anthropologists such as Daniels (2015), Benjamin (2019) and others debunk the popular notion that (racial) identities are a variable that inheres only in people and not in the structures of meaning-making and governance. Technologies such as SNS encode old and prevailing forms of social segregation and so may not necessarily ameliorate social cleavages.

It is important to note here, that given its disciplinary heritage, the concept of ‘digital collectivities’ allows me to critically investigate SNS as a unique archive of experience—embedded in shared histories and cultures of religious discrimination and conflicts. Digital collectives activate in individuals affect-intensive forms of experiencing religious subjectivities, without the involvement of the corporeal body. Rajagopal (2016), explains how India’s public sphere is marked by a populist wave as religious subjectivities expand across time and space through digital networks and mobilize people in patterns of practices which are hard to anticipate.

Shah (2007; also see 2011) argues that there is a persistence of ‘old’ ideas about the potential of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in leading societies towards more liberal and democratic systems of governance and away from the locally/nationally rooted ideas of belongingness and social segregations. According to Shah (2007), ‘Each new technological innovation in the postcolonial world since 1958… has been accompanied by a determined hope that Lerner’s modernization model will increase growth and productivity and produce modern cosmopolitan citizens’ (p. 24). Ogan and her students (2009) analysed studies in the field of communication and concluded that the present scholarship largely focuses on the role of ICT in development and actively embraces the modernist paradigm.

The modernization paradigm suggests that the proliferation of digital networks will democratize societies, empower individuals and allow for the values of liberal-secular democracy to emerge. Scholars who are socialized within this intellectual heritage often adopt a functionalist/structuralist approach where SNS are examined as tools deployed to perform and/or experience religious subjectivity online. For instance, in articulating the rise of ‘cyber religion’ scholars such as Helland (2000), Kawabata and Tamura (2007), Howard (2010) and others focus on the interdependence of the online and offline sites of performance to examine epistemological questions related to how religion is (discursively) practiced in a digital environment and how individuals ‘use’ the digital media to articulate their religiosity. Though this is a critical line of enquiry, I argue that it stems from a conceptualization of the religious as a priori to the digital and reduces the theorization of the digital-and-religion to questions of meaning-making alone. Such an approach does not address questions of the ontology of SNS as technology becomes the means for and the context within which new religious subjectivities emerge.

In the following sections, I unpack both the ontological and epistemological assumptions challenging our understanding of how religious subjectivities and SNS are folded into one another through digital collectivities.

Religious Subjectivities and the SNS: Epistemic and Ontological Concerns

It is important to acknowledge that although scholars have extensively examined the systems and structures of SNS (Mackenzie, 2006; Manovich, 2001), these accounts are critiqued for adopting an overtly generalizable framework focusing on the technical potential and possibilities of digital networks. Many digital media studies emphasize the unique ways in which individuals deconstruct, design and manipulate various digital formats (Coleman, 2010). As is evident, this creates a hierarchy in digital studies wherein SNS are conceptually prioritized as mere technologies, that is, as tools and means to enable users to accomplish more meaningful practices. The digital is placed in the service of the users in this logic.

On the other hand, I borrow from the works of scholars such as Kockelman (2013), Boellstorff (2012), Kelty (2008) and others to propose that SNS are a critical node in the emergence of distinct forms of religious subjectivities as they contain a comprehensive ecology of experience, practices and engagements. The critical task of unpacking SNS to understand how they destabilize the existing forms of social relations and give rise to unique forms of relationality is referred to as digital ontology (Boyer, 2013; Kelty, 2008). I draw from Kelty (2008) and Boyer (2013) to argue that the ontology of SNS and users inhabiting these networks constitute the change in social relations as initiated within the digital networks. My interest lies in elaborating how the digital material, structures and logic complicate and disrupt ways in which individuals practice and enact their religious subjectivities. As is evident, the question of digital ontology—the debate regarding who is a religious subject on SNS—is heavily informed by ‘how is a religious subject defined?’ The question of how this subjectivity is defined is essentially an epistemological issue because subjectivities are formed through practice and articulation. Epistemological questions deal with ‘how do we know’ who we are? On SNS, religious subjectivities are practiced discursively, that is, as forms of articulation. Individuals express their religious subjectivities by pledging their allegiance for their community and endorsing narratives and discussions, which support their religious ideology in the form of likes, re-tweets, re-share and comments. The ontological question of ‘who is a religious subject’ is informed by how this subjectivity is articulated, practiced and circulated through SNS.

To define the epistemology of religious subjects on SNS, I draw from the works of Bhatia and Pathak-Shelat (2019) and Butler (2004) and propose that individuals acquire a sense of their religious subjectivities based on systems of knowledge they inhabit and the discourses they consume or are exposed to. Also, they participate in the meaning-making processes by continuing the online regimes of thoughts and practice legitimized by their religious communities. As is evident, the epistemological turn in our enquiry will help us identify and understand online practices designed to produce meanings addressing the question ‘who is a religious subject?’ Questions related to the epistemology of the religious subject or the meanings associated with the online presence help examine how this subjectivity is articulated online.

I propose that religious subjectivities in SNS must qualify as a form of existence, conceivable within certain epistemological frames, to allow for a full meaning of the religious to emerge. For instance, if an individual intends to articulate their presence as a religious subject online, they must use the techno-linguistic domain afforded by SNS. Several digital media studies (Bhatia, 2020; Bradshaw & Howard, 2019; Sinha, 2017; Udupa, 2016, 2018, 2019) conducted to examine how individuals use SNS (Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, etc.) to practice their religious and political identities, reveal that many participants regularly forwarded religious and political messages, updated their profile photos to represent their religious commitments and political ideology, created and shared videos recording their religious festivals, and also engaged in abusing and trolling members from other religious community to pledge their allegiance. To create and sustain an online presence as religious subjects, participants learned to use the affordances of SNS; the methods and techniques used to produce these meanings were compatible with the informational architecture of SNS.

I am trying to draw attention to the epistemological problems raised by the issue of articulating religious subjectivities using SNS as a context for the meaning-making process. This includes addressing questions related to the production of religious subjectivities and their enactments within and through the SNS. This line of enquiry is politically saturated as it is embedded in questions of power relations regulating conduct in societies. On the other hand, the problem is ontological because the question at hand is to examine “What is religious subjectivity?’ or ‘Who is a religious subject?’ in relation to the informational architecture of SNS. To address the ontological question, we must make precise the specific mechanism of power and the techniques with which the religious subject is produced on SNS. Butler (2004) describes how the being (here, religious subject) cannot be separated from all the social and political forces within which it exists. According to Butler (2004),

The being to which this ontology refers is one that is always given over to others, to norms, to social and political organizations that have developed historically… It is not possible first to define the ontology of the body and then to refer to social significations the body assumes. Rather, to be a body is to be exposed to social crafting and form.

The religious subject normalizes certain ways in which subjectivities are enacted on SNS. As is evident, my analysis of the religious within the digital must bear witness to how the ontological renderings of subjectivities are braided with the epistemes of practicing and articulating political forms of religion. The religious subject emerges in relation to the informational structures of SNS to perpetuate or limit forms of political participation in specific contexts. It is crucial to examine two things: (a) how do individuals relate with the technologies, here SNS, to enable a form of religious subjectivity which is compatible with affordances extended by the technology and (b) how do they use these affordances to enact, give meaning to, and practice their religious subjectivities within the context of political forces.

To address these questions, it is important to unpack the ‘multifaceted relational structure’ (Faraj & Azad, 2012, p. 254) between SNS, the users - as are situated within the broader context of political forces, and the meanings which emerge from such an interaction. This relation between users-technology-meanings is extremely dynamic and is constituted of the mutuality between ‘those using technologies, the material features of those technologies, and the situated nature of use’ (Evans et al., 2016). In the following sections, I answer how the ontology of religious subjects as emerging within the information structures of SNS produces systems of meaning making designed to engage with political issues in India.

Who Is a Religious Subject?

Chaturvedi published an investigative report (2016) examining how online trolls are produced to promote the ideology of the BJP. Based on a series of interviews she conducted with individuals who operated as online trolls, she argued that online trolls are created with the help of technical features and informational architecture of SNS. In other words, the existence of these trolls—as users practicing their religious and political identities—ceases to have a legitimacy beyond the SNS. These trolls can be apprehended as religious subjects who deploy the unique affordances of organizational structures and distinct forms of practices on SNS. Udupa (2019), Sinha (2017) and Bradshaw and Howard (2019) provide an elaborate argument that online trolls come into existence through technical affordances enabling them to practice invisibility. Their religious subjectivity is constituted of practicing anonymity while abusing, threatening and undermining those who question and/or challenge the BJP-promoted practices of religious discrimination. Their existence is constituted of the intentionality to remain invisible, to distance their corporeal body from their online subjectivity and to inhabit digital networks to practice discrimination. The SNS have in-built technical affordances that allow individuals to control their visibility and searchability (Donath & Boyd, 2004). This makes possible actions related to searching for online users who have a different political ideology, confronting them through discursive threats and abuses, and flooding the dialectical site related to a political issue with their propagandist messages to suppress alternative voices.

In one of the interviews Chaturvedi conducted with a person who works as a troll, the interviewee explained that social media helps them locate people who challenge BJP’s Hindutva ideology, view their online networks and association and monitor their activities. These online trolls have fake profiles; they do not want others to know who they are but that does not mean they do not have faith in who they are online. They spend hours commenting, posting, tweeting and sharing to ensure that the Hindutva ideology is protected and promoted. On social media, their presence is related to how they use internet to practice their religion—they challenge, often abuse, threaten and harass people who question Hindutva. As is evident in this example, the affordances of SNS are ‘... the functional and relational aspects, which frame, while not determining, the possibilities for agentic action in relation to an object’ (Hutchby, 2001, p. 444).

In examining the role of SNS affordances in enabling distinct forms of religious subjectivities online, we can examine how religious subjects emerge in relation to their engagement with SNS. Such an approach helps unpack the relation between the materiality of technologies, the context of technology use and the attributes of the user.

For the online trolls who are religious subjects engaging with SNS to achieve determinate political ends, the materiality of technology enables them to create experiences on SNS, which shape their presence and practice as religious subjects. Drawing from the works of scholars, such as Boyd (2010), Treem and Leonardi (2012), Gray et al. (2013) and others, I argue that the discussion around digital ontology of use should examine how they create their religious subjectivities within larger digital collectivities with the help of two core SNS affordances:
Relationality: SNS have inbuilt features that allow users to form and maintain different kinds of relationships with a wide range of contacts and at a low cost. Donath (2007) coined the term ‘social supernets’ to describe large networks of relationships, which would have been impossible without SNS. These large networks are inhabited by several users whose religious subjectivities are guided by different intentionalities—some are working as paid employees, others are motivated by a desire to pledge their allegiance towards their religious communities, and yet others are driven by their need to seek gratification from the act of abusing and threatening others, without intending to inflict any real harm on corporeal bodies. In all of these and many other cases, what is common is this felt experience of operating from within the confines of an indeterminate digital collectivity which is descriptively normative and unpredictable. The associations between those who inhabit such collectivities as religious subjects ensure that the practices these users adopt to enact their religious subjectivities are common. For instance, they develop a shared set of discursive practices to harass, threaten or bully others who have a different ideology. In recent times, some of the words commonly used to threaten female journalists or cyberfeminists who challenge the Hindutva rhetoric include #prestitute, #urbannaxals, #sickulars, #tukdetukdegang (Bhatia, upcoming). They follow a set pattern for performing their religious subjectivities: (a) they target famous public profiles of individuals/professionals who identify as liberals and flood their posts/timelines/inbox with derogatory remarks; (b) they threaten to abuse them physically in offline spaces and sometimes try to publicize the other’s personal details such as their phone number and address; (c) they associate with each other based on their religious beliefs, political practices and ideologies. The emergent social supernets work to normalize certain ways of being and relating within the existing architecture of SNS.

Editability: This affordance relates to the ability of users to craft messages that reinforce the ‘politics of truth’ (Foucault, 1997) dominant in their societies. Udupa (2016), discusses this feature of editability to elaborate how individuals use SNS to re-imagine their position as religious subjects within digital collectivities. According to her, online archiving is one such feature users deploy to re-narrativize history, that is, the position of their religious community in relation to others, and thus justify the existing discourse and practices of discrimination and violence.

An affordance-based approach helps retain a relational ontology while exploring the links between individuals, the materiality of technology and the context of use. In the following section, I elaborate how inhabiting the SNS gives access to certain meaning-making processes and frames of reference used to define what it means to be a religious subject online. These meaning-making process and frames of references produce the epistemes of religious subjectivity, that is, how is the religious subject defined?—through posts, comments, stories, likes, and so on.

How Are Religious Subjectivities Articulated?

This question has its roots in the epistemological enquiry of the systems of knowledge production used to articulate what ‘religious subjectivities’ mean in the context of the political landscape and SNS in India. At this level, the emphasis is on understanding how certain modes of articulating - what it means to be a religious subject online, are reinforced, enabled and normalized within digital collectivities. Bhatia (2019, 2020) conducted an ethnographic study to examine the role of discursive social media engagement in shaping social identities—with an emphasis on the processes of information sharing, networking and expressing. With SNS, religious subjectivities are articulated as discursive allegiance pledged to protect the descriptively normative interests of religious communities. Religious subjects, who inhabit digital collectivities, learn how to perform their identities largely based on the responses to their messages from those who occupy the same online religious silo (Bowman-Grieve, 2009; Cherian, 2016; Weimann, 2015). Users who share the same interests and motivations re-share/re-tweet other users’ posts, like their comments, extend solidarity for a cause by substantiating the claims/arguments of those from within their religious community and create content to further the dominant religious ideas. A very common and critical practice used to enact their religious subjectivities is punishing the ‘aberrant’ and ‘abnormal’ who refuses to conduct themselves in line with the dominant rationality.

Some of the commonly followed practices of disciplining the deviant include cyberbullying, harassing, abusing and threatening; these practices sometimes transcend the digital into the offline and manifest in the form of politically motivated arrests of owners of ‘abnormal’ (read, subversive) social media profiles/content.⁵

Digital collectivities and its religious subjects are constituted of epistemes arising from violent, reactionary and exclusive systems of power. The existence of digital collectivities and religious subjectivities is dependent on the mechanisms of SNS such as anonymity, searchability, editability and others to produce a discourse on discrimination. Binary ways of engaging with political issues and the creation of Manichean identities such as us-them, Muslims-Hindus, liberals-right wing, natives-invaders and others inform what it means to be a religious subject within SNS. This is extremely problematic because such a meaning-making process stems from a need to categorize the possibility and the practice of annihilating the other as the primary way of making sense of the self.

Also, as the intentionality is to define the self in constant opposition to the other, most of the systems developed to produce knowledge and cultivate relations within such a system are affect-based. In this, individuals often re-appropriate the democratizing potential of SNS to create exclusive online spaces and networks and reinforce the existing social segregation between religious communities in India.

Bhatia (2020) explains,
[It is interesting to note] how an infrastructure of agency informs individual’s engagement with social media platforms (Friedlander, 2008; pg. 177). The motivation to use social media for the selective curation of ‘the self’ (Jenkins, 2006) is to translate their personal allegiance with a religious community into public narratives meant to infiltrate the meta discourse on religious politics in India.

As is evident, who is defined as a religious subject within digital collectivities, what kind of enactments are normal, and what are the dominant frames of interpretation from within which opinions about any political issue are formed, are all concomitant with the forms of epistemes naturalized within the informational architecture of SNS.

Conclusion

Very few studies in this area discuss how the digital interacts with the politico-religious to produce new forms of being, meaning-making and practice. I argue that the users of SNS develop, adopt, practice and express religious subjectivities in specific ways made possible due to the informational infrastructure of SNS. I deploy an affordance-based approach to argue that digital collectivities and the religious subjects who inhabit them are constituted through the interaction between the users and the SNS. Based on my theoretical analysis, I argue that SNS shape the ontology of the digital collectivities constituted of users who conduct and perceive themselves and others primarily as religious subjects.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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