Navigating Global and Local: Reddit's Influence on Community Formation and Identity Among Gen Z Indian Users

Abstract

This study explores how Gen Z Indians navigate questions of identity, community, and culture on the global social media platform Reddit. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 15 Indian Redditors aged 18-25, we analyze their experiences through a theoretical framework that brings together key concepts from digital anthropology, postcolonial studies, and science and technology studies. Our findings reveal Reddit as a complex site of cultural negotiation where Indian youth construct hybrid identities, imagine communities beyond geographical boundaries, and grapple with the platform's affordances and limitations. However, we also highlight how these processes of meaning-making and community formation are deeply shaped by the enduring power asymmetries of coloniality and the digital divide in India. The dominance of English on the platform, the marginalization of Indian vernaculars and cultural referents, and the underrepresentation of lower-caste and working-class voices all point to the ways in which Reddit's promise of inclusivity and democratization remains unfulfilled for many Indian users. To make sense of these tensions and contradictions, we develop an analytical approach that foregrounds Indian Redditors' own cultural frameworks and meaning-making practices while also situating their experiences within larger structures of postcolonial power and inequality. This decolonial and pluriversal approach, we argue, is crucial for moving beyond one-size-fits-all models of digital sociality and attending to the irreducible diversity and specificity of Indian digital cultures. At the same time, we reflexively interrogate our own positionality as researchers and the limits of our inquiry, acknowledging the paradoxes of doing decolonial scholarship within a still largely Western-centric academic ecosystem. We thus offer our findings not as definitive conclusions but as an invitation to further conversation and critique, opening up new avenues for research and praxis at the intersections of Indian cultural politics, digital media, and decolonial theory. Ultimately, this study makes a case for the urgent need to decolonize our approaches to global social media platforms like Reddit and to center the lived experiences, cultural knowledges, and political aspirations of digital subjects at the margins. In doing so, we hope to contribute to a more expansive and pluriversal understanding of digital sociality – one that makes space for multiple ways of being and knowing online.