Putting the selfie to work: Image making and work/time discipline in the margins of the Indian state

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Webb, Martin; Salim, Farhat and Azam, Riad. 2024. Putting the selfie to work: Image making and work/time discipline in the margins of the Indian state. In: Avishek Ray; E. Gabriel Dattatreyan; Usha Raman; Martin Webb; Neha Gupta; Sai Amulya Komarraju; Anuja Premika; Riad Azam; Farhat Salim and Pranavesh Subramanian, eds. Digital Expressions of the Self(ie): The Social Life of Selfies in India. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 50-73. ISBN 9781032694788 [Book Section]

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Abstract or Description

In India, the use of biometric images as a means of evidencing whether workers or schoolchildren are present is becoming increasingly prevalent. By exploring how the capturing of images has become a key feature of organizing the work-time discipline in Delhi, this chapter shows that narratives about the state implementing infrastructures of digital surveillance from above as part of regimes of techno-moral governance only provide a partial account. Surveillance also emerges from below as managers and outsourced workers operating in the margins of the state repurpose ubiquitous messaging services such as WhatsApp to create informal networks of visibility. Within these networks, selfies—and other images—take on a significance and purpose rather at odds with the feelings of pleasure, leisure, and self-expression more often associated with their digital circulation and begin to reveal the everyday, even banal, ways in which regimes of transparency, accountability, and work/time discipline are produced.

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Book Section

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https://doi.org/10.4324/9781032694726

Additional Information:

“This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in ‘Digital Expressions of the Self(ie): The Social Life of Selfies in India’ on 6 February 2024, available online: https://www.routledge.com/Digital-Expressions-of-the-Selfie-The-Social-Life-of-Selfies-in-India/Ray-Dattatreyan-Raman-Web-Gupta-Komarraju-Premika-Azam-Salim-Subramanian/p/book/9781032694788. It is deposited under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.”