A Postcolonial Investigation of Online Dating in Contemporary India

当代印度网上约会的后殖民调查

• 批准号: 2764012
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University of Roehampton
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2022 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2764012
• 关键词: Postcolonial; Investigation; Online; Dating; Contemporary

This research will analyze the structure and use of online dating apps in contemporary India at the intersection of neoliberalism and postcoloniality. It will address their origins in Western technological cultures, and examine how these apps- based on Western norms- are re-appropriated in my home country, India. The approach of this study is interdisciplinary: applying ideas from media and literary studies, and foregrounding factors like sexuality, race and class in a postcolonial frame, the project will map the values and practices of app users, and examine the particular notions of 'romance', 'intimacy' and 'love' they contest and re-envision. Expanding existing knowledge of dating apps that is dominated by Western use experiences, I will develop new critical perspectives on platform technologies to understand how they are enmeshed in with culturally specific norms and values concerning romantic relationships mediated via home-grown dating apps. While digital dating is now revolutionizing romantic partnerships in smaller cities, traditional Indian culture has only prioritized love in arranged marriages. With a significant potential to destabilize the carefully constructed social matrix of the country, there is a need to articulate a postcolonial view of how dating app users are finding love within the socio-cultural constraints in India.Challenging the neoliberal technological system, this thesis will question the impact of digital colonialism that is found in multinational companies to homogenize local cultures to surrender their data to the developed world. Only a few studies have gone beyond the dominant Western 'technology consumption' framework to examine online dating from a postcolonial perspective. The aim of this study is to demonstrate how addressing neoliberalism and postcoloniality as entangled processes offers a powerful lens of insight to examine the implications of these emergent socio-technical phenomena, in ways that attend meaningfully to the values, culture and power relations at play in contemporary India.

本研究将在新自由主义和后殖民主义的交叉点分析当代印度在线约会应用程序的结构和使用。它将讨论它们在西方技术文化中的起源，并研究这些基于西方规范的应用程序如何在我的祖国印度被重新利用。这项研究的方法是跨学科的：应用媒体和文学研究的想法，以及在后殖民框架下的性、种族和阶级等前景因素，该项目将绘制应用程序用户的价值观和实践，并检查他们质疑和重新设想的“浪漫”、“亲密”和“爱”的特定概念。扩展以西方使用体验为主的约会应用程序的现有知识，我将对平台技术发展新的批判性观点，以了解它们是如何与特定文化规范和价值观相结合的，这些规范和价值观与通过本土约会应用程序介导的浪漫关系有关。虽然数字约会正在小城市掀起一场恋爱关系的革命，但传统的印度文化只把包办婚姻中的爱情放在首位。印度精心构建的社会矩阵极有可能破坏稳定，因此有必要从后殖民的角度阐述约会应用程序用户是如何在印度社会文化约束下寻找爱情的。本文将挑战新自由主义技术体系，质疑跨国公司中发现的数字殖民主义的影响，这些殖民主义使当地文化同质化，将其数据交给发达国家。只有少数研究超越了西方主导的“技术消费”框架，从后殖民的角度审视在线约会。本研究的目的是展示如何解决新自由主义和后殖民主义作为纠缠的过程提供了一个强有力的洞察镜头来检查这些新兴的社会技术现象的含义，以有意义的方式参加价值观，文化和权力关系在当代印度发挥作用。