Social Media in Globalizing Indian Society: Positive and Negative Impacts

Indian society is a traditional society. The traditional communication system was mainly based on face-to-face communication. There were no specialized institutions and communicators in this system. Folk media and folklore were major institutional forms of communication in these societies. Modern mass media particularly print media played an important role in the modernization of these societies. The major limitation of modern mass media was that the process of communication was largely one-way and there were limited options for a feedback loop in this type of communication. There was no way to know the reaction of the receiver of information transmitted at a mass scale by these media. The advent of the internet has changed the form and process of communication and made it interactive. This interactive nature of internet-based media has changed the nature of social interactions at the global, national, and local levels. Web 2.0 technology revolutionized the communication process and gave rise to a new media form that today is popularly called “social media”. The capacity of social media to integrate different forms of communication and transmit them with a single device has both positive and negative impacts in a society like India. The present paper is focused on these aspects of social media in a fast-changing society like India.