Special Issue: The Limits of Online Visibility for South Asian Religious Minorities

The ubiquity of smartphones and the logic of algorithms that power leading content-sharing apps such as Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube have changed how, through what, and when people become visible locally and globally. In this special issue, we explore how minority actors in South Asia—including social activists, filmmakers, citizen journalists and others—tactically navigate these new digital environments and how their practices of becoming visible—or, in fact, of remaining invisible—alleviate or exacerbate their often-precarious lifeworlds. We call our interlocuters engagements with online visibility tactics. This has to do with the fact that minorities’ often volatile circumstances do not allow for long-term strategies: Their practices are usually versatile, spontaneous, and highly context-sensitive as they need to advance and retreat in response to the frames of majoritarian politics.

These tactics emerge from and respond to three interdependent moments: The frames that define how minorities can become visible, the interplay between limits and thresholds of a communicative form in the process of becoming visible, and the possible capture of these visibilities by external parties for their own gain and algorithms that change potentially emancipatory articulations into mere data for value extraction.

We understand these three moments as relating in different ways to dynamics of cognitive or communicative capitalism where communication itself becomes the means of capitalist accumulation and increasingly neo-feudal value extraction (as Jodi Dean has recently argued). We are interested in the myriad ways communicative interactions change once the conditions under which people converse produce financial value.

This special edition grapples with these conditions through an engagement with the practices of actors belonging to South Asian religious and ethnic minorities. We discuss our interlocuters’ different tactics with regard to how they handle dangerous terrains, how they avoid risks of exposure and surveillance, and how they increase the emancipatory possibilities that come with digital visibility. Our contributions work with and learn from the different media practitioners that run up against the emancipatory limits of the digital space.