Paper short abstract:

Silicon valley’s spatio-technical imaginary of WhatsApp as ‘digital living room’ is critically reflected upon in this paper which looks at a women’s WhatsApp group of a housing complex, in terms of the domestication of WhatsApp and negotiation of gendered sociopolitical digital-physical continuum.

Paper long abstract:

WhatsApp was referred to by Mark Zuckerberg (2019) as a ‘digital living room’, especially in contrast to Facebook which he called a ‘town square’. The resulting idealised (digital) spatial imaginary rests on an assumed universal characteristic of the “living room” (Watkins, 2015), a utopic imagination of a privacy-focused communications platform, where the spatial metaphor evokes the idea of a space of security, trust, intimacy and familiarity in and through which people can come together, share news and information, and nurture feelings of belonging (Williams et al.,2022). However, McDonald (2015) talks about “domestication” of digital technology in a particular culturally specific context and everyday life. In this, Williams et al. (2022) reflect on how the Western spatio-technical imaginary unfolds when it lands in India, in terms of the ‘domestication’ of what is evoked as “the domestic” (living room) and “reflect or reinforce the politics of society and/or the state” (Pine 2018). With this as a point of departure the present paper looks at a women’s WhatsApp group of a housing complex as a continuity between the digital and the physical space, in terms of the domestication of WhatsApp and the negotiation of the gendered sociopolitical digital-physical continuum. It highlights how on one hand the WhatsApp group reflects the politics of the housing complex and the gendered space, while on the other it reflects women’s agency within the larger ambit of socio-political negotiations.