Abstract
The Idea Cellular ad campaign has included advertisements dealing with themes ranging from participative democracy and education for all to ending caste wars and controlling population. I examine the ads for their tendency to posit technology as a solution to solving socio-political problems and in turn idealizing a neo-liberal subject who, aided by technology, can be a unit all into itself. These ads may then be seen to operate as ‘technologies of subjectivity’, with the cell phone network enabling the ‘self-activating capacities’ of the neo-liberal subject. Specifically, I analyse how the ads mix the discourses of inclusive development and neo-liberal reform by reconfiguring the relationship between the state, corporations and the consumer-citizen. Furthermore, I unravel the creative tensions the ads negotiate while forging individual desires and responsibilities into collective goals by exploring how their construction of neo-liberal subjectivities exists in multi-layered processual relations with brand management strategies, development narratives, technological affordances of cell phones and advertising cultures in India.
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