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 generous 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 particularly 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 component 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 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 intending to showcase the field site and the scale of development. (Non commercial 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.