Dr Samhita Barooah
Founder QueerUp, Guwahati
How many of us use online services to avail basic essential services? In the pandemic world practically all of us use it to access everything from medicines to ration. Sometimes we hear only from service providers forget about family and friends. Insurance agents, bank officials, credit card providers, healthcare service providers, food delivery personnel, gas agents, emi collectors, house owners, vendors of essential food items, cable tv providers, garbage collectors and domestic workers. Just name the people, all of them have been calling, texting or whatsapping in some way or the other during this terrible lockdown period. We are pissed off most of the time when we can no longer avail a service or product due to our difficult income situation. The pandemic has brought out the worst in us. Digital abuse is growing in this regard. We are not realising that we can be rude to all these people whose livelihood depends on our responses online. Fraud calling is indeed a huge threat which is why we tend to get rude and defensive online. But recently people have abused mobile service providers for caller tune voice messages used for Covid 19 awareness programme. Thats really strange as a recorded voice is simply sharing information whether its by a celebrity or a common employee it really doesnt matter. Sometimes callers tend to get personal and continue to provide information out of context. They hardly can respond to abusive behaviour of customers as they are bound by contracts of bondage and customer pleasing pledges.
With corona times, digital abuse online is on the rise. People think they can get away with any obscene comment or abuse online or on phone. Mostly men use abusive tones against women callers and exploit their patriarchal previleges. Even provocative media stories on digital platforms do not spare women and the non binary queer community. Women's character assasination, rape and personal choices gets maximum scrutiny in these abusive digital platforms. Women becoming highest consumers of alchohol in Assam has made it to the headlines of a local news daily. Why couldnt such consumption patterns reflect upon other genders? Why focus only on women? Does it have to do with the morality norms of society? Digital abuse is not just limited to public posts. In most of the private conversations too, women face tremendous pressure from their family and intimate partners judging their bodies, sexuality, dress, makeup, use of language and intimate moments which gets abusive when they resist any form of exploitation. Sometimes fake profiles on social media handles are created to either abuse or to maintain survelience on women. There are others who try to comment unnecessarily on your profile updates or your posts shared if they do not reach out to their imagined worldview. Digital abuse is not just use of foul language or obscene pictures but it tends to shame you in public. Even whatsapp forwards can be very offensive. People share these forwards as jokes unknowingly but misogyny, body shaming, racist and sexist remarks are part of digital trolling. With increased online activity women and queer people have been exposed to further discrimination. A lot of institutions and organisations are engaging with these issues only to find trouble in such situation. Cyber crimes and survellience protocols are also regulating people's freedom of expression. Digital abuse of engaging people online through 24x7 schedules is limiting personal activities. It is indeed a very testing time to lose people offline and find their visible presence online. Digital insensitivity and mechanical communication is creating a huge disconnect amongst people. Online menace is another form of violation of human, animal and social indignity which needs immediate attention.
