to arise. One reason may be the absence of any religion- based political groups here.
A couple of villages that form Panchagrami come under the affir-mative action plan policies58 of the government of Tamil Nadu. The office of the panchayat president can thus only be occupied by the members of the Scheduled Castes or Scheduled Tribes, and as a result people here sometimes prefer to contest elections as independent candidates, even if openly supporting a political party. For instance, one of the panchayat boards here has a president who belongs to the Scheduled Caste and the AIADMK; he stood as an independent candidate for this Scheduled Caste- based reserved position.
Having introduced Panchagrami and its people we now move onto the next section, which details the research framework and the method-ology used in this project.
The project framework
This book is the result of a 15- month online and offline ethnographic study of Panchagrami. Ethnography59 as a research methodology encom-passes methods such as participant observation, interviews, surveys and so forth. All of this was performed offline as well as online60 (the latter involving friending people on Facebook, becoming members of various WhatsApp groups, following several on Twitter, connecting with profes-sionals on LinkedIn and observing their online activity over this period).
This process required living with the people of Panchagrami, meeting them every single day for 15 months and participating in their daily lives. Meeting people many times and having both formal interviews and informal conversations with them were thus part of the process.
Over 100 formal interviews and innumerable informal and casual con-versations were conducted to get a deeper understanding of the people and their usage of social media.
Conducting ethnography at Panchagrami was not easy. The main challenge was to build trust and gain access to peoples’ inner circles, so that they would give access to personal social media interactions. This required experimentation, imaginative thinking and a lot of patience.
For the first three months, owing to a portion of Panchagrami being very traditional, it was challenging to recruit young women in particular as research participants. Style of dress and how I projected myself mat-tered a lot. On the one hand, wearing a T- shirt and jeans aroused doubts about the genuineness of the research; on the other, formal clothing led
to my being perceived as a salesman. In the end it was only by wear-ing traditional items of clothwear-ing such as kurtas, seemwear-ingly the garb of an ‘Indian intellectual’, that I cemented my position as an academic, to whom women thought it was safe to speak.
Over the period of 15 months, the number of Facebook respondents who agreed to be friended for research purposes was 172. While 132 were friended on a research profile specifically created for the purpose of online ethnography, 40 more were friended on my original Facebook profile, as they did not wish to be friended on the research profile.
Further, around 53 personal contacts were established on WhatsApp;
this number kept increasing over the period of field work and even afterwards, eventually reaching around 210. A similar situation arose with the WhatsApp groups. 41 informants were followed on Twitter and 67 connections were established on a separate LinkedIn profile; once again this number continued to grow even after the end of the field work.
Two project questionnaires were undertaken,61 namely Question-naire 1 (Q1) and QuestionQuestion-naire 2 (Q2). Both were administered to people who were on social media. Q1 was administered to around 130 people at the beginning of the field work, and Q2 to 150 people at the end of the field work. Other than these two project questionnaires, which were administered uniformly across the nine sites of the larger project,62 three other smaller surveys were administered at Panchagrami in order to help understand certain aspects of the society in more detail.
The field work also used social media interactions (such as data mined from Facebook and WhatsApp), communication diaries, communication maps, relationship circles, browsing history files and archival research to understand the impact of social media in this area better.
Signed ethics and consent forms guaranteeing anonymity were obtained from all those who agreed to be interviewed as research participants.
Conclusion
To anyone unfamiliar with the study of Indian society, some of the details provided in this chapter may seem somewhat daunting. What is a caste and how does it relate to class? How do the government’s categorisations of people fit with the ones they use to describe them-selves? It would be hard enough to gain a clear understanding of all of this in a static situation. But the context for this ethnography is any-thing but static. What happens when, simply because of changes in
real- estate values, some local villagers who have remained in most respects much as before find themselves with assets and incomes com-parable to the employees of the IT sector that caused this upsurge in property values? How do they now relate to other inhabitants who did not benefit? The penultimate chapter addresses issues that parallel this point. What happens to an education system that everyone now perceives as geared towards something called a ‘knowledge economy’, as it seeks to embrace the requirements of both the villagers’ children and those of IT professionals?
Fortunately by looking at this context as a whole we can see two complementary properties of these changes. Clearly there are all sorts of divisions and differences that must be taken into account through-out. One of the most significant is that of gender, which cuts across many of the others; another is the differentiation between a family’s internal dynamics and the way in which it faces outwards. But the larger point is that these differences are mainly traditional divisions, with categories such as caste going back thousands of years. So in a way this also expresses what all these groups have in common – all are regulated by caste differences, gender differences and the rules of family life. As noted at the start of this chapter, that is really the story of this book; how a society that appears to be characterised by dif-ferences is actually showing continuity with the long- term traditions that lie behind them.
Only by bearing these points in mind can we embark on the way this narrative is expressed by and through social media. For this book, as with others in the same series, is not dominated by evidence of how social media has transformed society, but rather the exact opposite: how social media has itself been transformed by its adoption in this context.
We can only come to appreciate what social media is in South India when we recognise that within a few years social media has become a power-ful expression of a much older and wider story of Tamil society itself.