Ahmedabad: Family not ‘liked’ in virtual world, says study

AHMEDABAD: Shanay (name changed), 21, a city-based management student, has several accounts on social media. “Many of them accounts are not known to my family. I either use pseudonyms or don’t tell them about them. I have a different persona for my gaming community, professional profile or photo sharing app – and I don’t want them to know everything about my activities,” he says.

A paper titled ‘Narratives selves in the digital world: An empirical investigation’ by MICA faculty members Varsha Jain and Manisha Pathak-Shelat along with student Anupama Ambika and Russel W Belk, a faculty member at York University in Toronto, was published in the latest issue of Journal of Consumer Behaviour.
Prof Jain said in the nascent stages of social media on sites like Yahoo! Messenger and Orkut, users had no other option but to share all about them. “Now they have different platforms for different purposes. Our research was focused on the concept of self for these users and we got to know that their identities have also evolved with digital spaces,” she said. Prof Pathak-Shelat said the generation gap exists among the family. “Classic cases could be family WhatsApp groups where the exit of a member could raise eyebrows, even when they are not okay with spiritual forwards. I believe the gap will narrow in the years to come with the new generation being digital natives,” she said.