Internet Connection

Coffee shop franchises and fast food outlets have become an increasingly common fixture in India’s urban landscape since the liberalisation of the country’s economy in 1991.

Armed with free WiFi, they offer a respite from the often unreliable and patchy internet connectivity of outdoor spaces.

These venues however attract a specific clientele – one that is typically affluent, elite and English-speaking – a tiny fraction of the city’s population.

Most middle class youth in Pune on the other hand live on roughly $2 - $4 per day. 1

Many have never been to a coffee shop or a pizza parlour.

Most do not own cars, computers or credit cards.

Economically priced out and excluded from newer establishments in the city that offer free WiFi, they stake out more creative ways of going (and staying) online for long periods of time.

1 A 2017 study found that the lower middle class make up two-thirds of India's middle classes (Krishnan, Sandhya and Hatekar, Neeraj (2017): "Rise of the New Middle Class in India and its Changing Structure", EPW, Vol 52, No 22, pp 40-48).

The Selfie

In India, the selfie has taken on epic proportions.

Splashed across billboards and shop windows are images of Bollywood stars and sporting icons inviting you to enter a world of digital possibilities through the selfie. Even the Prime Minister’s fondness for the selfie is well known.

For young people in Pune, the selfie is a far more precarious space.

They are quick to judge each other based on their selfies. The selfies of upper middle class youth feature cafes, pubs and nightclubs as backdrops.

For lower middle class youth unable to access these spaces, they commonly pose on their motorbikes - their most prized possession and often their only means of transport.

They also turn the selfie into a visual spectacle, adding emojis, multiple filters and pixelated backgrounds, sometimes even replacing them to feature entirely new ones.

By making their digital manipulation explicit, they, too, mould themselves into modern, tech-savvy Indians.

Check In

The worldwide proliferation of social media has sparked fears that young people are becoming increasingly socially isolated and prone to depression, forgoing physical friendship for chatting online from the confines of their bedrooms.

Sherry Turkle, professor at MIT, predicts that mobile phones are making us “alone together”. 2

In Pune, youth rarely use social media in isolation.

Rather, they go online to spark offline social interaction, often ‘checking in’ at various locations on Facebook to see if any friends are nearby with whom they can meet.

As they leave behind their digital traces online, these become markers for their friends online to locate them in real time.

Checking in, however, is about more than just finding friends; it is also about reimagining the city as filled with endless fun.

Like many other cities in India, processes of gentrification and the creation of spatial enclaves in Pune produce further divisions between rich and poor.

2 Turkle, Sherry (2011): Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, New York: Basic Books.

Tagging

The term jugaad, a uniquely Indian approach to making use of limited resources through shrewd improvisation, characterises everyday life in Pune.

Taking jugaad into the online space, youth improvise new ways of handling digital technologies such as ‘tagging’ on Facebook to achieve their objectives of accumulating ‘likes’.

Many young people in Pune tag dozens of friends (sometimes even seventy or eighty at a time) in status updates and photos, turning the tag feature into a distinctly social tool.

By tagging numerous friends, they ensure their photos cut through the queue of Facebook’s never-ending stream of newsfeed activity, landing directly onto the timelines of their friends.

Internet Speeds

In comparison to the global average internet connection speed, India’s is relatively low, ranking 89th in the world.

To combat slow internet speeds during the day, many young people in Pune access the internet during the early hours of the morning when the rest of the city is asleep.

By navigating their way around the online crowd of the city during the day to go on social media at night, young Punekars inscribe new time zones of friendship into the city.

Paying attention to the daily ebbs and flows in online traffic, they become attuned to the rhythms of the city.

In 2017, Pune was announced as the first city in the world where Google would deploy Google Station, providing high speed internet access in public areas.

For young people like Rohan, initiatives like these will make the process of going online a far less troublesome one.

Yet as the internet occupies an ever increasing chunk of their everyday lives, how will their virtual and real lives continue to intertwine?

Only time will tell.