Maps, movements and mobilities: Facebook and ‘checking-in’ among young men in Pune, India

ABSTRACT

This article examines the political significance of Facebook’s check-in feature as used by lower-middle class young men in the western Indian city of Pune. Drawing on the literature on urban transformation and building on the local notion of timepass, I argue that young men produce new spatial configurations of the city on Facebook. In doing so, they make legible their own narrative of what it means to be young in the city as a counterpoise to both the lifestyles of those who frequent Pune’s newer locations of leisure and the educational aspirations that facilitate access to these spaces.

KEYWORDS:

• Youth
• social media
• city

Acknowledgments

The article is based on the author’s doctoral research in anthropology at King’s College London, University of London. The article was made possible thanks to the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI/Sutasoma Award), King’s Faculty of Social Science and Public Policy Research Fund and King’s India Institute Small Grants Scheme. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Royal Geographers Society Annual Conference at Cardiff University and at the Asia Research Institute’s Asian Urbanisms Cluster Seminars at the National University of Singapore.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Rahul Advani is a final year PhD Candidate in Anthropology at the India Institute, King's College London. Rahul's research interests include youth, consumer cultures and digital technologies. Rahul is currently writing up his doctoral thesis, titled ‘Online and “real” lives: the anthropology of Facebook and friendship among middle class young men in an Indian city’. His ongoing research can be viewed on a website he launched at www.lifeinametro.in.

Notes

1 Colloquial term for motorcycle.

2 I have changed details of the names of people described in this article to protect their anonymity.

3 Although this paper’s focus on young men derives from my wider research interest in the largely male-driven growth of social networking sites in India, it must also be noted that young men were much more easily accessible than women given their freedom to occupy public spaces for long periods of time (Jeffrey, 2017; Lukose, 2009; Verma & Sharma, 2003; Osella & Osella, 1998). Female students in many of Pune’s colleges were more likely than young men to return home directly after classes.

4 In 2016, Pune was announced as one of the first designated smart cities as part of the ‘smart city’ initiative by the Modi Government designed ‘to ‘leapfrog’ India into a digital urban age of innovation, entrepreneurialism and endless prosperity’ (Datta, 2018, p. 13).

5 It is important to note that unlike newer privatized spaces of leisure in the city that are frequented by both men and women, leisure spaces catering to lower income segments of the population are primarily male spaces.

6 The pleasure-seeking identities young male Punekars articulated through their disengagement from education bear resemblances to what Stahl (2016) describes as anti-school, hyper-masculine laddish masculinities exhibited among working class boys in the United Kingdom.

7 Given that Instagram was still being discovered by many lower-middle class young men at the time of my fieldwork, a more in-depth discussion on Instagram is beyond the scope of this article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Royal Anthropological Institute: [Grant Number RAI Sutasoma Award 2018].