Twitter in India

As I watched We the People on NDTV last weekend I began to wonder how India was redefining Mahatma Gandhi’s slogan of ‘Swadeshi’. The topic of discussion was “Is Twitter here to stay”. For the sake of contextualization, this particular episode was titled “We the Tweeple”. Having a sense of Indian mainstream media’s dislike for social media, I was not expecting the discussion to be very supportive of this micro-blogging trend. As expected, two themes dominated the discussion: 1) social media sites like Twitter can’t substitute mainstream media; 2) internet facilitated communication in India was largely elitist.

What surprised me was how Indians (more appropriately elitist segment of the Indian population) had embraced a global trend and yet thoroughly customized it to the country’s social style. Given the closely networked global community, India can’t afford to insulate itself from trends like twitter, but we can give global trends a ‘swadeshi’ feel. There are no national boundaries on twitter, what is available to someone based in New York is equally accessible to a resident of New Delhi. So what’s ‘Swadeshi’ about twitter? It is the perception and use of the media by the Indians.
The personality cult is dominant in the Indian society. In politics, political personalities and parties sell more than actual policies; in Bollywood, the casts more than script attracts people to cinema halls; in sports a below average performance is acceptable if the player exhumes a glamorous persona.  Likewise on twitter, more than information and content it is controversy and attention of mainstream media that determines followership trends among Indians. Those with twitter accounts either have to post a controversial tweet or somehow get cited in the mainstream media to increase their followership. Information disseminating twitter accounts like those of Delhi University (586), Reserve Bank of India (94), Reliance (RelainceWorld has 1,305 followers) and Infosys (1,200) have dismal followership among Indians. Shashi Tharoor, Amitabh Bachchan, Lalit Modi, Priyanka Chopra and Sania Mirza have much larger number of followers. Unlike the CNN no news agency in India can claim to have over a million followers. This cannot solely be attributed to low internet penetration rates in India, freedom of choice and social trends play a vital role in determing followership trends on twitter.
The discussion on ‘We the Tweeple’ also generated a similar sense. The issue of disclosing one’s personal life in the public domain rather than the information potential of twitter dominated the discussion. Social media forums like twitter have two uses: 1) how the individual connects to the world, 2) how the world of information comes to the individual. In India the former aspect is dominant; it is more about tweets by celebs, issues of privacy and autonomy and the ‘who has more followers’ competition. The tweet that attracts more attention is not the one informing people about Anil Ambani’s business plans but the one that discloses that he has ‘unfriend’ his brother Mukesh Ambani on Facebook.
Social media may be a tool to enhance communication but it adapts to rather than change patterns of social interaction in societies. The twitter phenomenon in India proves the point.