Institute For The Future

Rituals of Intimacy, India, Mumbai, Mehta, 12/19/2008

Expert interview. We spoke with Dina about her ethnographic research on social media in India and what trends and signals she saw in the context of emerging forms of physical and digital intimacy. Dina has been doing market research and ethnography in consumer media technology for twenty years, cutting across a wide spectrum of demographics. She also consults for companies interested in using social media to promote their brands.

Our discussion with Dina highlighted a number of issues at the intersection of technology and intimate relationships.

Personal technologies, especially mobile phones and social networks, are being used to negotiate social constraints. First, they can be used to have private conversations away from the surveillance of parents and copresent family members. “Kids are one step ahead” says Dina, in using technology to do this. Parents are wary that, e.g., SMS is being used to carry out covert conversations with romantic partners, so kids take care to erase their messages immediately, keep their phones on vibrate, and so on.

Second, a broader demographic uses these tools (more notably SNS than mobile in this case) to exercise greater choice in their circles of friends and acquaintances. Facebook and orkut and blogs allow people to reach beyond their friends, their spouses’ friends and reinforce personal connections with geographically distributed people. Connecting with old classmates through SNS is a big use case.

Dina argues however that technology does not play a large part in causing these shifts. To her mind, the need for intimacy and connection has always existed in Indian culture and tech simply supports and extends it. She cites examples of “dating cards” with cheesy sayings “roses are red.. will you be my sweetheart ” and contact information on them that college kids handed out to the opposite sex at college festivals etc. about 12 years ago. Such connection-seeking / flirting behavior  face-to-face has been replaced by SMS.  Dina characterizes Indians as “basically promiscuous, only they don’t make a noise about it”, which would seem to indicate that some of the recent media coverage about affairs conducted over SMS, scandalous MMS videos of school kids etc., are more a reflection of technology making such ideas become publicly shareable and consumable, rather than creating a facility/need for such behavior in the first place.

According to her, social network sites are used less for romantic purposes than for building up a network of friends, an “online hangout space” and for displaying popularity by means such as the sheer number of friends or number of Orkut scraps.  Intimate relationships are more on-to-one – when things move to IM or SMS, for instance. People use Bluetooth on their phones to exchange media all the time, but that is also more entertainment and less personal communication.

The generation gap in technology use is echoed by Dina. Although even 45-year olds are getting heavily in “orkutting”, orkut is already sliding down the perception scale as “a downmarket SNS”. Younger people tend to not treat online spaces any differently than real spaces in terms of maintaining personal relationships – “just another place to hang out”. However, most online connections are reflections of real –world connections.

The older generation –parents, grandparents, are often handholded by their kids into using more technology, such as skype to talk to their kids in different countries, or sending MMS messages to grandparents. They are generally positive in technology adoption as soon as the value becomes apparent; they then want to get more into skype, webcams etc.

In addition to circumventing social and physical constraints using devices like phones, kids also use them to bridge the contextual gap between “their world” and the “parent’s world”. Dina talks, for instance, about kids taking pictures inside clubs and discotheques to show their parents that these spaces are not as bad, sleazy etc as they might be perceived to be.

Phone use in rural areas tends to be more utilitarian – small and medium business owners benefit most from having the phone and are most able to pay the bills, cost of handset etc.

Dina predicts that, especially with regard to online social networks, there will soon be a backlash against putting one’s private life out there for everyone to consume. The backlash might be triggered by bots or spam, much like Orkut first lost ground, but it will be cyclical – people will turn around and look for alternatives which offer them greater control (this is why facebook first gained ground on orkut), and usage will rise again. India is a “follower nation” which requires a new bandwagon to jump on when the old one is exhausted, according to Dina.

Personally for Dina, getting online through SNS and her blog has completely changed her life, made new connections, etc. She thinks that hardware costs are decreasing dramatically, and the biggest stumbling block is cheap, reliable, everywhere internet access. The internet-on-phone services she has seen so far have proven slow and unreliable.

The issue of control over personal communication, and how phone- and web-based services are changing that equation, has come up in many interviews. Burgeoning SNS networks afford control over circles of privacy and a broader range of social connections. “India is a rather insular country” says Dina.  This has been a huge change for many people.  Another recurring theme has been the reactive manner in which control is exercised. A teenager whose aunt got upset when she saw him get “married” on facebook instantly put her on limited profile. Dina characterizes India’s SNS use as “Exploratory” and [consistent with historical evidence in other countries, there is usually a phase where a greater awareness of privacy and concerns over corporate control cloud the “carefree days” of early SNS, leading people to seek more privacy].  In general, it seems that these technologies are generally viewed optimistically in terms of supporting connection, rather than causing kids to spend less time with family etc.

Culturally, values remain stable – a public display of intimacy would still be frowned upon, so its not as if a greater freedom of self-expression online translates into tolerance in the real world. There is however, a shift from admiring the west and its popular culture, to a sense of “India Shining” [ to reappropriate the government slogan]. Because of things like BitTorrent, productions like movies and music reach India without the time lag that used to happen earlier.

Pornography remains a huge industry, again out of the public eye. It is hard to predict whether the generation now growing up with casual access to tools of self-expression and choice-ful personal communication will shift culturally to greater public acceptance of intimate behaviors. One example where these collide is the case of girls on orkut not using their own pictures – there have been instances where people stole the pictures and photoshopped them into porn videos.

In terms of devices, Dina sees an opportunity to leapfrog the laptop entirely, using better phones and docking devices.  

Twitter is a web 2.0 tech which is catching on with marketers, entrepreneurs, pr folks.

Traditional media coverage leads to increase in the use of these services. Twitter, orkut, bigadda. Follower syndrome with internationally successful services.