Ageing on the internet: Feminist perspectives on sexist practices

Abstract

This research article undertakes a timely interrogation of the anti-woman digital practices on social media environments, particularly Twitter – specifically, practices seeped in gender bigotry and ageism. It introduces the relatively unexplored concept of digital temporality vis-à-vis digital feminist analysis, and relies, to a limited extent, on empirically examining Indian Twitter primarily and American and Australian Twitter to a lesser extent. The article analyses how image-aesthetics for women, dependent on their age (manifested in appearance and perception of women’s digital image), are a patriarchy-propped digital trend and how that promotes a culture of digital ageism, predicated on women’s appearance. This study also examines and establishes how women users on Twitter are susceptible to continual ageing as images on the digital screen and how digital ageing is a gendered phenomenon. The scope of this article is to examine digital ageism from theoretical perspectives, and offer empirical examples from news portals and Twitter media to substantiate some crucial arguments. This project, of course, also opens more scope to quantitatively account for digital ageism through detailed empirical studies as is also the scope to examine the various subversive tools that could potentially be utilized in gendered rubrics to defy or negate sexist ageism on social media.