attitudes towards social media

Other than knowing how people use social media, we wanted to explore people’s attitude towards social media and its impact on vari-ous aspects of their lives. Our first question on this theme, presented in Fig. 4.20, concerned people’s views on the appropriate age for a child to start using social media. The responses range from 13 in the rural Chinese site to 17 in south India, but compared to many of our questions the range is relatively small.

We then enquired as to whether people have access to social media at their workplace and/or at their site of education.

Fig. 4.20 Distribution of responses to question on what age is appropriate for a child to start using social media

Fig. 4.21 Distribution of access to social media in workplace/

educational institutions during working hours

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Fig. 4.21 illustrates that in south India and Brazil access to social media was restricted/ not permitted during working hours at work-places/ educational institutions. This was not surprising as in our Brazilian site people mostly worked in hotels, often as cleaners and waiters, with strict supervision of their work. However, our qualitative work on whether people would actually find ways around these restric-tions and use social media would reveal quite different patterns. This was particularly true of south India, where often the modern workplaces and educational institutions were most restrictive. Yet equally in both these settings smartphones make it extremely difficult to regulate and enforce such restrictions.

We then asked if people felt social media was good for educa-tion. This question receives considerable attention in the next chapter, because it was a contentious issue in several of our field sites. Here we will see how in south India schools with lower-income intakes were very encouraging of social media usage as an educational tool, while upper- class schools were the most concerned about banning it as a distraction.

A similar question was asked about the impact of social media on work as well. As illustrated in Fig. 4.23, the responses of Brazilians ech-oed the perception held by managers that social media was a distraction in the workplace. However, even here managers also recognised that it could have positive uses as well. For example, when a domestic worker

Fig. 4.22 Distribution of responses to question on whether social media has a good or bad effect on education

sees that her employer needs a professional to fix an electrical problem, she uses WhatsApp to contact a friend or relative to do the job. Most seem to see the positive impact of social media as outweighing its dis-tracting nature.

The next perspective was a more general enquiry as to whether people felt social media had become a burden. Several of these ques-tions, as with the titles of several chapters in this book, reflect our desire Fig. 4.23 Distribution of responses to question on whether social media has a good or bad effect on work

Fig. 4.24 Distribution of responses to question on whether users felt interaction on social media was a burden

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to respond to popular questions posed to us, rather than expressing only academic interests and concerns. In this case the answer is mainly inter-esting as a contrast to the dominant representation of social media in popular writing.

The next question also follows from such popular discussion in journalism and elsewhere.

There may be a time-specific component to these results. The two highest positive responses came from our Brazilian and Turkish field sites. These were also the two countries that saw high- profile popular demonstrations during the time of our field work:  against the President Dilma Rousseff in Brazil and around Gezi Park in Turkey. In both cases the use of social media was closely associated with these events. It is worth noting that, in practice, Spyer felt that there had been almost no direct comment at the time on local social media, so this survey result seems to be more an association that had left its impression rather than a reflection on what people actually do.

In south India this was a period where people were coming to realise that some issues (such as abuse of women) had become more promi-nent through social media in particular, emerging from that base into greater visibility on traditional mass media such as newspapers and television.

Finally the survey echoed another very general question that we tend to be asked outside of academia, and that is reflected again in Chapter 13. It is whether social media had left the respondents feeling happier, had made no difference at all or had left them feeling less happy.

Fig. 4.25 Distribution of responses to question on whether social media had made users more politically active

This last question, rather like the first, was one that actually did make some sense in relation to the general qualitative research. It is in the more conservative sites of south India and southeast Turkey that we feel social media has made the most difference to people’s lives by open-ing up new possibilities. Factory workers in China, on the other hand, became most dependent upon social media for realising their aspira-tions and for compensating for the sheer degree of their unhappiness with their offline conditions. However, the clearest finding is the rela-tive paucity of negarela-tive feeling throughout as compared to journalistic reports (see Chapter 13).

Conclusion

It may be rare that a set of figures has been published with this num-ber of caveats and self- criticisms. In the case of almost every question in this survey at least one of the researchers has suggested that the results have to be understood in the light of the context of that field site; the responses may have more to do with the way people interpreted the question, rather than anything that reflects on their actual behaviour.

As noted at the start of this chapter, we do not regret the exercise of conducting these questionnaires and attempting to make sense of the results. The sheer range of answers to most questions also supports one of the central points of our entire project, which is that an assumed Fig. 4.26 Distribution of responses to question on whether social media made users happier

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extrapolation of quantitative results from one place to another is prob-lematic. At least these results provide a visual impression of the extent of regional difference in social media usage.

The other reward of this exercise is that it raised many questions that were productive. Researchers had to ask themselves why people answered in the way they did, which is especially helpful when the results did not accord with what we knew from our 15 months of field work. The results of the quantitative exercise directed us to look deeper into our qualitative insights. One example was Spyer’s discovery that respondents in Brazil actually meant that they had just consulted with others before adding friends, not that they had asked for their permis-sion to do so.

The material from this chapter is taken from a single questionnaire with 1199 respondents across all of our nine field sites. We have resisted any temptation to look for correlations. These are in any case problem-atic with such material, but would have been particularly so when our respondents spanned a range of age, gender and income differences. We hope it is clear from our discussions why we remain cautious in using quantitative findings. None of the issues and problems we have pointed out with respect to interpreting these figures relate to the small size of the questionnaire. They would have remained exactly the same if we had asked ten times this number of people. Our overall emphasis on the greater authority and reliability of qualitative findings, therefore, is not because we never carry out quantitative surveys:  it is because sometimes we do.