With the growing popularity and ubiquity of social media worldwide comes the notion that there is a new generation of so-called ‘digital natives’,¹ who were born and grew up in the digital era. Social media seems set to become an ever-growing foundation to many of their everyday relationships. As a result much of the world is struggling to make sense of this new phenomenon and its impact. Precisely because social media is now so embedded in young people’s lives, anxiety is rising that these are replacing offline interactions and offline relationships.

However, a comparison between two kinds of relationships designated as online and offline may imply either that they are mutually exclusive or opposed to each other. Yet throughout our research we have approached relationships as created, developed and sustained through integrated online and offline interaction. The entire range of offline relationships, from family through school and work to social relations in the wider neighbourhood, may also be present online in a manner that is rarely separated out from one’s offline life. The popular perception of online relationships as things which can be contrasted with a ‘real world’ – inhabited by one’s real or more authentic offline relationships – seems therefore simplistic and misleading. This corresponds to an earlier critique of the concept of the ‘virtual’, a term prominent during the early years of internet use.² In short our study treats social media in much the same way that everyone treats the landline telephone, never described today as a separate ‘online/on-phone’ facet of life.

It is, however, essential for us as researchers to recognise that whatever misgivings we may feel as academics about this dualistic terminology, it remains a primary mode by which people around the world understand and experience digital media. Our informants constantly do speak about a separate online world. Furthermore we need to acknowledge that people give different meanings to these terms ‘online’ and ‘offline’. For example, in the south Indian field site, when asked about the privacy of photographs, many people responded: ‘I won’t share it online, we only share it offline.’ As Venkatraman noted, by ‘offline’ people actually mean sending photos to their close friends via WhatsApp. Technically WhatsApp is ‘online’ in the sense of being sent through a smartphone app, but ‘offline’ in these people’s understanding because that is not for them ‘the internet’. ‘Offline’ also here refers to the very private nature of the sociality, whereas ‘online’ is understood to be the public-facing aspects of the internet. Yet the same informants in other contexts refer to WhatsApp as social media and thereby online. So even if we want to respect the fact that the participants in our field sites commonly use the terms online and offline, both their and our use of these terms is often inconsistent.

This chapter will first deal with the popular concern that increased digital mediation leads to less authentic relationships than offline ones – a belief that can lead to people regarding human societies as becoming less ‘real’ when relationships are mediated by digital technologies. The chapter then moves closer to our own approach, which examines sociality in the age of social media through the lens of ethnography. The final part of the chapter will further explore the new possibilities for human experience and social relationships that have been created through global uses of social media in different contexts.