Choice between voice and social media

The presence of smartphones did not necessarily mean that all communication was routed only through social media. In fact several social factors determined communication systems in Panchagrami. For example, communication with the elderly members of a family mostly takes place through voice. This could be due to comfort with a more traditional media, parental control and disapproval of the use of other media by younger people. Sometimes factors such as literacy, absence of knowledge of a specific language such as English or even lack of interest or confidence in learning newer skills also play a role in channelling communication through voice.

This is evident in the case of Ravi’s mother, whose limitations force Ravi to call her over the phone even for routine everyday communication.⁵⁰

Ravi, aged 25, belongs to a lower middle class family and works as a data entry operator in a medical information processing company in Panchagrami. His younger sister is married and lives in Chennai. His father, a farmer, also works as a plumber to supplement his income, and his mother is a homemaker. Though all the family members now have personal mobile phones, his sister acquired one only after she got married; until then she used her mother’s phone. Ravi’s parents own non-smart Micromax phones, while Ravi owns a Samsung Galaxy core smartphone.

On workdays Ravi generally packs his lunch from home. If this gets delayed, he calls his mother around mid-morning from his office to check if he can drop in at home for lunch. This would just involve a brief chat for around two minutes, with the conversation only extending if she wants him to run an errand. Their understanding is that if he does not call her, she will not prepare lunch for him. On one occasion his busy schedule at the office meant that Ravi was unable to call his mother; instead, he just sent her a SMS⁵¹ to let her know of his arrival for lunch that day. When he went home, he was surprised to find that she had not prepared anything for lunch, and she startled him further by stating that he had not informed her of his arrival. To prove otherwise, he seized her mobile phone to show his message. That was when Ravi discovered that his mother never read any messages. She did not know how to read them, especially if they were in English. Ravi was particularly surprised since on an earlier occasion he had received a response from his mother’s phone to an English text of his. He subsequently discovered that it was his sister who had messaged him from his mother’s phone.

Ravi now makes a point of calling his mother, recognising that the only way to communicate with her is by speaking directly. He says that she was not interested in learning how to message, even in Tamil. Now the pair seems to have worked out a way to communicate even when Ravi is busy at work and cannot talk to her. He gives her a missed call;⁵² if the phone rings twice, the message is that he will be at home for lunch; if he doesn’t call, it means he will not be there. Ravi feels that for his mother a mobile phone has simply replaced a landline; she uses it to make calls and for nothing else.

Ravi calls his father very rarely, and never during work hours, since his father might be busy working either in the field or on plumbing jobs. However, his father can read text messages, so Ravi messages his father in Tamil or in an Anglicised script of Tamil. The texts are mostly very short ones, usually meant to pass on information. For example, one of his messages to his father was ‘Arisi vangiyachi’ which means ‘I have bought rice’ – letting his father know so that he does not buy it as well. His father rarely replies, but Ravi knows that he reads his messages. He also knows that if he tells his mother whatever information needs to be conveyed, it will be passed on to the entire family. He jokingly refers to his mother as the ‘telephone exchange’.

Though Ravi tends to restrict conversations with his sister when he is at work (calling her over the phone only during the weekends or after work), he does message her occasionally. Most messages to his sister are forwards and jokes (though he makes certain that he does not send her any ‘adult’ ones). His sister calls their mother several times a day to chat; she also rings their father at least once a day. Generally chats with the entire family take place only at weekends. Ravi says that his parents insist on hearing his sister’s voice at least once a day.

The case of Ravi’s mother very clearly illustrates the choice of voice over text functions due to issues with literacy and technical skills. Emotional concerns may also arise, especially in the relationship between parents and daughters.

Consider the case of Shobana, a 22-year-old college student in her final year of study. She owns a Nokia smartphone, a birthday present from her uncle, and a non-smart Nokia feature phone. While her smartphone is meant for social media activities and chats with her friends, Shobana uses her feature phone exclusively for her family; she does not give this number to her friends. This exclusivity in channels of communication only began after an incident involving her parents when she returned home late from college. Shobana says that she messaged her mother letting her know that she would be late, immediately after which her mother called her a couple of times; she received no response, which seems to have irked and worried her. From her mother’s perspective, all she needed to know was that Shobana was safe, and hence answering her call in such situations should be mandatory.

Shobana, an only child, is aware that her safety is the highest priority for her family. She feels that her mother had become more anxious with news of various rapes⁵³ and murders happening in the country. Here lies the reason why Shobana does not use the same phone for her friends and family. Her mother and, to a certain extent, her father get irritated when their calls do not immediately get answered; as Shobana’s mother says, her daughter tends to talk to her friends for hours on end, and calling her does not get any response. Hence, the need for an exclusive phone line for her parents. Her feature phone doesn’t have any data (internet) pack added to it, while her smartphone has a 3G internet data pack. Her parents communicate through SMS at other times, but when it comes to Shobana they seem very specific that communication should be by voice.

Even in upper middle-class families, which had social media savvy elders, their hierarchy within family circles and expectations of respect influenced the choice of platform for intergenerational communication. They considered the use of new media for certain communication to be impersonal and disrespectful. Expectations from family elders in this direction are clearly elucidated in the case of Raghavan, a 65-year-old retired head of training and development of a major pharmaceutical company. He much prefers people to call him to inform him about life events, rather than just sending a message on social media. He even considers an email announcing certain life events as impersonal and disrespectful to elders.

We see here both a preference for voice and for synchronous communication rather than asynchronous communication.⁵⁴ So sending voice messages over WhatsApp to them does not appeal as much as having a phone conversation or Skype/Google Hangout conversations for those living far away. However, this perspective slightly shifts when communicating with immediate family members who have migrated to a foreign land for work or education. Chapter 4, which examines family relationships, discusses this aspect in much more detail, and extends it to other forms of kinship as well.

Nevertheless, when we move from the use of communication platforms by the elderly or parents, we encounter a wider world that is now populated by social media. The first social media survey Q1, as discussed in Chapter 1, was conducted in 2013 when the field work began, on a sample of 130 respondents, all of whom were users of social media.⁵⁵ The results showed that Facebook was the most popular social networking site (84 per cent), followed by WhatsApp (62 per cent) and Twitter (34 per cent) for this sample of social media users. Though sites such as LinkedIn (31 per cent) did appear in the survey, it was specific to the IT population and people who were working in other corporate sectors. Over the course of the field work there was continued evidence of this general trend of platform popularity among the residents of Panchagrami who used social media. An exception might be that of WhatsApp, as it seemed likely that during field work its popularity might have even overtaken that of Facebook.⁵⁶

Very few people had accounts on Instagram, and while BBM was popular among upper-middle-class corporate employees who still hung onto their Blackberry phones, Snapchat or Instagram did not feature to any significant extent.⁵⁷ People were members of multiple platforms at the same time, for example people on Facebook were also on Twitter or WhatsApp, and the reverse was also evident.

Among the users of social media who were surveyed through Q1, 83 per cent⁵⁸ suggested that they accessed social media platforms through smartphones, though the range of smartphone brands and the associated data plans varied widely as suggested earlier. The other popular channels for accessing social media were laptops (61 per cent) and desktops (47 per cent). While most used broadband or USB dongles, there were cases of people who tethered their phones for internet access. The following sections of this chapter provide an introduction to the presence of three important social media platforms, namely Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter, as they appeared at Panchagrami. LinkedIn was used more by the IT sector as both a professional networking tool as well as a knowledge resource. LinkedIn groups helped users to develop professional contacts for furthering career prospects, while at the same time providing news on current developments in their respective tech domains and articles on leadership and personal or professional development. Within the IT sector, LinkedIn is seen as both a knowledge network and a network to increase opportunities in users’ professional lives.