From Screen to Society: Electronic Media and the Reshaping of Socio-Cultural Practices among Rural Women in Rewari District, Haryana, India

Abstract

The rapid diffusion of television, mobile telephony and internet-enabled platforms into rural India has opened a new channel through which long-standing social and cultural arrangements are questioned, negotiated and occasionally revised. This study examines how exposure to electronic media relates to the social and cultural practices of rural women in Rewari district, Haryana — a state characterised by strong economic performance alongside persistently adverse gender indicators. A quantitative descriptive design was administered to survey 400 married women aged 18–60 years drawn from 14 villages across three community development blocks using a multistage stratified sampling method. Data were gathered through a researcher-administered structured interview schedule and analysed in SPSS 25.0 using descriptive statistics, chi-square tests of association, Pearson product-moment correlations, independent-samples Z-tests and one-way analysis of variance. Mobile phone ownership was reported by 68.8% of respondents and varied significantly by age, literacy and caste. The influence of electronic media on both social and cultural practices declined significantly with respondent age and with number of living children, and rose with educational attainment and forward-caste status. Content type mattered: entertainment, educational, health and livelihood programming were significantly associated with changed practices, whereas news and devotional content were not. Slightly more than half the sample reported at least one barrier to media use, the most frequent being household and care work rather than infrastructure. The findings position electronic media as a conditional rather than automatic instrument of change, and indicate that time , poverty and digital skills — not device availability alone — now constitute the binding constraint on rural women's media engagement.