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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how WhatsApp is domesticated in a Brazilian apartment block and examines its productivity for vicinal interactions. The ethnography reveals how the uses and appropriations of the platform reconfigure spatialities and temporalities, shaping collective living in the Digital Era.

Paper long abstract

In the Brazilian context, chat groups operating on WhatsApp are widely popular in apartment blocks and shape their neighbourhood practices. The so-called “grupo de condomínio” (in Portuguese) circulate information and are also used to organise gatherings among neighbours and their pets, facilitate the sale of products, recommend services, provide assistance in emergency situations, discuss internal politics, and collect donations. Drawing on an ethnography conducted in Brasília, the capital of Brazil, this paper discusses the domestication of WhatsApp in a residential space and how it co-produces sociality and materialities. The fieldwork was carried out in a block referred to as the Ipês Residential Block, which comprises 438 quitinetes (studio flats) inhabited predominantly by the Brazilian middle strata. The multimodal fieldwork lasted 18 months and combined participant observation, 38 semi-structured interviews, photographic documentation of the flats, and engagement with the block’s digital artefacts, particularly four WhatsApp groups and one broadcast list. The study examines the platform’s affordances and discusses its productivity for collective life. The fieldwork reveals how the uses and appropriations of WhatsApp both reflect values, moralities, and normativities and produce new temporalities and spatialities. They institute particular forms of communication and meaning-making by scaling up both the volume and the rhythm of interactions, complicating social relations. The apartment block also experiences an expansion of its boundaries, becoming “portable” and “mobile”, accessible remotely through smartphones. The ethnography sheds light on neighbourhood practices in the Digital Era and offers a potent comparative basis for studies of vicinity and digitalisation.