S OC One of the first ethnographic studies to explore the use of Shriram Venkatraman I social media in the everyday lives of people in Tamil Nadu, AL MED Social Media in South India provides an understanding of this subject in a region experiencing rapid transformation. The influx of IT companies over the past decade into what was once a space dominated by agriculture has resulted in a complex juxtaposition between an evolving knowledge economy and the traditions of rural life. While certain class I tensions have emerged in response to this juxtaposition, A a study of social media in the region suggests that similarities have also transpired, observed most clearly in I N SOUTH the blurring of boundaries between work and life for both the old residents and the new. Venkatraman explores the impact of social media at home, SOCIAL work and school, and analyses the influence of class, caste, I age and gender on how, and which, social media platforms ND are used in different contexts. These factors, he argues, I MEDIA have a significant effect on social media use, suggesting A that social media in South India, while seeming to induce societal change, actually remains bound by local traditions and practices. SHRIRAM VENKATRAMAN has a PhD in Anthropology from UCL and is currently an Assistant IN SOUTH Professor at Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi (IIITD). He is a trained professional V enkatraman statistician and, prior to his doctoral studies, held leadership positions at Walmart in the USA. INDIA His research interests include workplace technologies, organisational culture and entrepreneurship. COVER DESIGN: Rawshock design Free open access versions available from www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press £35.00 Social Media in South India Social Media in South India Shriram Venkatraman First published in 2017 by UCL Press University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT Available to download free: www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl- press Text © Shriram Venkatraman, 2017 Images © Authors and copyright holders named in captions, 2017 A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library. This book is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non- commercial Non- derivative 4.0 International license (CC BY- NC- ND 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work for personal and non- commercial use providing author and publisher attribution is clearly stated. Attribution should include the following information: Shriram Venkatraman, Social Media in South India. London, UCL Press, 2017. https:// doi.org/ 10.14324/ 111.9781911307914 Further details about CC BY licenses are available at http:// creativecommons.org/ licenses/ ISBN: 978– 1– 911307– 93– 8 (Hbk.) ISBN: 978– 1– 911307– 92– 1 (Pbk.) ISBN: 978– 1– 911307– 91– 4 (PDF) ISBN: 978– 1– 911307– 94– 5 (epub) ISBN: 978– 1– 911307– 95– 2 (mobi) ISBN: 978– 1– 911307– 96– 9 (html) DOI: https:// doi.org/ 10.14324/ 111.9781911307914 Introduction to the series Why We Post This book is one of a series of 11 titles. Nine monographs are devoted to specific field sites (including this one) in Brazil, Chile, China, England, India, Italy, Trinidad and Turkey – these have been published in 2016– 17. The series also includes a comparative book about all our findings, How the World Changed Social Media, published to accompany this title, and a book which contrasts the visuals that people post on Facebook in the English field site with those on our Trinidadian field site, Visualising Facebook. When we tell people that we have written nine monographs about social media around the world, all using the same chapter headings (apart from Chapter 5), they are concerned about potential repetition. However, if you decide to read several of these books (and we very much hope you do), you will see that this device has been helpful in showing the precise opposite. Each book is as individual and distinct as if it were on an entirely different topic. This is perhaps our single most important finding. Most studies of the internet and social media are based on research methods that assume we can generalise across different groups. We look at tweets in one place and write about ‘Twitter’. We conduct tests about social media and friendship in one population, and then write on this topic as if friendship means the same thing for all populations. By presenting nine books with the same chapter headings, you can judge for yourselves what kinds of generalisations are, or are not, possible. Our intention is not to evaluate social media, either positively or negatively. Instead the purpose is educational, providing detailed evi- dence of what social media has become in each place and the local con- sequences, including local evaluations. Each book is based on 15 months of research during which time the anthropologists lived, worked and interacted with people in the local language. Yet they differ from the dominant tradition of writing social science books. Firstly they do not engage with the academic literatures v on social media. It would be highly repetitive to have the same discus- sions in all nine books. Instead discussions of these literatures are to be found in our comparative book, How the World Changed Social Media. Secondly these monographs are not comparative, which again is the pri- mary function of this other volume. Thirdly, given the immense inter- est in social media from the general public, we have tried to write in an accessible and open style. This means we have adopted a mode more common in historical writing of keeping all citations and the discussion of all wider academic issues to endnotes. We hope you enjoy the results and that you will also read our com- parative book – and perhaps some of the other monographs – in addition to this one. vi INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES WHY WE POST Acknowledgements This book is a product of my doctoral research (2012– 16) undertaken while at the Department of Anthropology, University College London. The research was a part of a larger project called the ‘Global Social Media Impact Study’ (GSMIS), also popularly known as ‘Why We Post – The Anthropology of Social Media’, dedicated to understanding the impact of social media in nine different field sites in eight different countries around the world. This would not have been possible without the gener- ous financial support from the European Research Council (grant ERC- 2011- AdG- 295486 Socnet) and the Department of Anthropology, UCL. I am particularly indebted to my mentor and supervisor Prof. Daniel Miller and my project team: Elisabetta Costa, Nell Haynes, Tom McDonald, Razvan Nicolescu, Jolynna Sinanan, Juliano Spyer, Xinyuan Wang and the two amazing project managers Pascale Searle and Laura Haapio- Kirk, all of whom started as colleagues and have gone on to become close friends through the years of the project. I am also par- ticularly grateful to my second supervisor Lucia Michelutti, the faculty members at the Department of Anthropology and my cohort of doctoral students for their encouragement and extremely valuable suggestions throughout this research. I am grateful to my field supervisor Anupam Das from IIM, Kozhikode for all the encouragement during field work, but particularly for the timely help of formulating an Indian Research Ethics Committee, without which my field work would not even have begun. I would like to thank our Honorary Research Fellow, Nimmi Rangaswamy, for not only providing extremely valuable suggestions for this book, but also for her keen insights during my field work. I am particularly indebted to Kala Shreen, CCHD- Chennai, Honorary Research Fellow and film maker of the South Indian research videos, without whose help the visual compo- nent of my research would have been incomplete. I would like to thank my earlier mentor Prof. Govinda Reddy for his insightful suggestions and encouragement throughout this vii project. I am grateful for the help and support of Haripriya Narasimhan, S. Venkatraman, Aparna, N. Venkatraman, Archana, Anusha, Sr. Lourthy Mary, Merlin, Chithra, Shalini, Preethi, Padmalatha, Seethalakshmi Janani, Pandiaraj, Gunanithi, Padmavathi Sethuraman, Gnani Sankaran, S. Sumathi, M. P. Damodaran, Grace, Jegan, Roy Benedict Naveen, Asma, Priyadarshini Krishnamurthy, Vishnu Prasad, Jill Reese, Murali Shanmugavelan and G. B. Yogeswaran. I am also grateful to UCL Press for helping me take this book from a manuscript to a finished product. This research would have been impossible without my anonymous informants. I am extremely grateful for their trust, time, patience and interest in sharing their offline and online lives with me. Note All four maps (figs 1.1–1.4) are screenshots from Google Earth intend- ing to showcase the field site and the scale of development. (Non com- mercial use of Google Earth - https:// www.google.co.uk/ permissions/ geoguidelines.html) The field work was conducted between April 2013 and August 2014. The Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu at that time was Ms J. Jayalalitha. However, as of 2017 there has been a shift in the political situation of Tamil Nadu with the demise of Ms J. Jayalalitha. viii Introduction to the series Why WE Post Contents List of figures x List of tables xi 1. Panchagrami and its complexities 1 2. The social media landscape: people, their perception and presence on social media 25 3. Visual posting: continuing visual spaces 56 4. Relationships: kinship on social media 101 5. Bringing home to work: the role of social media in blurring work– non- work boundaries 136 6. The wider world: social media and education in a knowledge economy 169 7. Conclusion: social media and its continuing complexities 197 Notes 208 References 229 Index 241 ix List of figures Fig. 1.1 An aerial view of Panchagrami (Google Earth map) 8 Fig.