No room for dissent: WhatsApp’s ‘digital living room’, kinship and lived democracy in India

Dr Emily Dawson will chair this STS Research Seminar with Dr Philippa Williams, Reader in Human Geography at Queen Mary University of London. The event will consist of a live online talk (40 minutes), followed by a Q&A session. To receive the joining instructions, please email sts@ucl.ac.uk.

Since WhatsApp launched in India in mid-2010 it has become the leading digital platform for communication in India - with over 500 million active users - and created new kinds of digital spaces in which people are consuming and sharing political content in the privacy of their ‘digital living rooms’. All major political parties as well as party proxies and ‘Internet Hindus’ play a central role in producing political messaging which ‘ordinary citizens’ circulate and consume on their group chats. In this context where WhatsApp’s private digital spaces are instrumental in shaping political talk and political imaginaries across different sites and spaces, this paper examines how the quality of India’s lived democracy is being transformed. Drawing on digital ethnographic research conducted around the 2019 Indian national election the paper interrogates the limits of WhatsApp’s ‘digital living room’ imaginary with respect to the lived realities of family, kinship and the nation within digital-physical, and private-public spaces.

Dr Williams' research (in Varanasi, New Delhi and Mumbai, India and London, UK) focuses on experiences of the state, citizenship and the politics of digital technology. This paper is co-authored with Lipika Kamra, O.P Jindal Global University together with Pushp Johar, Mukesh Kumar, Fatma Matin Khan and Ekta Oza as part of our project on ‘Social media and everyday life in India’ which is funded by WhatsApp.