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(Cross-posted on my fellowship blog - How International Values Shape Communications Technologies)

When you are doing an interdisciplinary study of social technologies across four countries, it is important to focus on the connections between otherwise unrelated factors, and it is useful to develop a framework to look for these connections.

Here’s the framework we have been using for our research on social media in BRIC countries –

The outer circle is the national context, which comprises of the five interconnected Cs of computing devices, connectivity, culture, content and capabilities. The inner circle is the social media ecosystem itself. Our research, which looks at the connections between the two, has three layers –

Layer 1: The role of the national context in social media adoption
Layer 2: The dynamics of the social media ecosystem
Layer 3: The role of social media in changing the social context

Finally, the national contexts we are looking at are the four BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and United States (as a reference point).

At my official fellowship blog — How Global Values Shape Communications Technologies — I use the Geert Hofstede model to study the cultural differences between the BRIC countries and US and wonder how a collectivist, paternalist, status-oriented and relativist social web will look like —

- What if the social web subjugated individual profiles and activity streams (high individualism) to group affiliations (high collectivism)?

- What if the social web parsed and displayed relationships between two users based on their status relative to each other (high power distance) instead of treating everyone as a “friend” (low power distance)?

- What if the primary relationship on the social web was “becoming a fan” (long term orientation) instead of “becoming a friend” (short terms orientation)?

- What if the complex relationships between users automatically changed over time and across context (low uncertainty avoidance) instead of staying the same until it is proactively changed (high uncertainty avoidance)?

Do you think that such a social web will ever come into existence? Do join the conversation at the How Global Values Shape Communications Technologies blog.

I first asked: are there any subcultures in urban India that go beyond religion, caste, class and language? (tweet)

Then I realized that before I try to understand Indian subcultures, I’ll have to first ask: what is (the mainstream) Indian culture? (tweet)

So, I asked my friends on Twitter –

So, what is (the mainstream) Indian culture? Bollywood? Cricket? Weddings? Hindi soaps? Divisions wrt religion/caste/language? What else? (tweet)

Dina Mehta, Rajesh Lalwani and Harshil Karia responded that in a country as complex as India, there can’t be a dominant mainstream culture –

RajeshLalwani: I wish it was that simple. I don’t think it is that easy to qualify Indian cultural mainstream. (tweet) can we define anything as mainstream for an entire nation (tweet).

Harshil: I don’t believe there is a master Indian culture (tweet)… (even though)… key cultural indicators are religion, family, democracy (and the nuances attached to it) and cricket. (tweet)

Dina: I shy away from such stereotypes. My worldview may differ from yours. What’s mainstream to me may be different to you. (tweet) eg. twitter is mainstream for me & not a subculture. makes me think is culture static? can anyone say this “IS”. (tweet) More importantly, my worldview of urban indian culture is driven by my existence here. slums juxtaposed with hi-rise (tweet).

I have received some interesting responses to my query — are there any subcultures in urban India that go beyond religion, caste, class and language?

But even before I try answer that question, I need to answer another: what is a subculture?

Let’s start with culture first. Culture is the way of life for an entire society, the sum total of the lifestyles of its individual members. To understand a society’s culture, you need to understand how its members form their identities — from the things they own, the experiences they have, the relationships they share, and the meaning they create (through literature, art and music).

Every society has a mainstream culture, several subcultures and/ or underground cultures, and, rarely, even a counterculture.

The mainstream culture is the sum of high culture that is valued by the society (classical music/ traditional dance) and popular culture (blockbuster movies/ prime time soaps) that is liked by most of the members in the society.

As the Yahoo! Fellow at Georgetown University, I’ll spend the next year studying how social media in BRIC countries will be used differently from the first world countries and the implications this will have on how individuals and institutions in these countries engage with social media.

Inspired by Grant McCracken’s post on how trend-hunting is meaningless unless it is rooted in a deeper understanding of the underlying culture –

it is precisely when “culture above” resonates with the “culture below” that things “take,” that innovation has a chance to transform us in substantial ways.

– I realized that to understand how social media in BRIC countries will be used differently from the first world countries, I first need to understand how social dynamics in these countries differ.

So, as a starting point, I asked myself — and my friends on Twitter — if there are any subcultures in India, like this list of subcultures in the West.

I’m searching for someone who has studied Indian urban culture in detail, maybe done a PhD in it (tweet).

I’m also looking for books on Indian culture like Pavan Varma’s ‘The Great Indian Middle Class’ and Rama Bijapurkar’s ‘We Are Like That Only’ (tweet).