Private Square

THE KAPOORS, ONE OF THE MAIN DYNASTIES OF Bollywood, had a meeting with the prime minister this month. As they sat, Ranbir Kapoor told Narendra Modi that they had been wondering how to address him—“Prime Minister Ji or Pradhan Mantri Ji!”—with the debate around it happening over a week on the family WhatsApp group. The world thus came to know that the Kapoors have such a group and the world was not sur­prised because almost every family has one. In fact, each has multiple groups. There is that umbrella one of the extended family, including parents, children, uncles, aunts, grandparents, granduncles, grandaunts, cousins, etc. Then there will be separate groups for each sub-category. The cousins will have one all of their own. A line of offspring from a set of grandparents will have theirs. The number of these groups, much like families themselves, branch on into numerous permutations and combinations. This is not the only branching. Every individual in all these groups will also be members of other groups that are not related to family. There will be groups of office employees, of the housing society, of clubs and political parties they are members of. There will be groups for the school year they passed out in; within that, there will again be the ones of friends from a particular class. Imagine it as a line of capillar­ies shooting and intertwining across the whole body of the world through a person’s connections and preferences. This would be true as much for the Kapoors as for you and your next-door-neighbour because WhatsApp groups have become the private square of the world.

It did not come out of thin online air. Social media is premised on the forma­tion and strengthening of personal networks. It took an elemental urge in hu­man beings and used technology to amplify and commercialise it. Facebook got there first in scale. WhatsApp was the piling on of another phenomenon onto that layer—instant messaging. In the 1980s, if a son settled in Mumbai wanted to talk to his mother in Bihar, he had to go to a booth, book a trunk call and wait until the connection happened. Phones then became available easily at homes and making a call was immediate but expensive. That became cheap and then came mobiles and in that you could speak instantly and also send messages, but there was a price attached to it. By the time of WhatsApp’s beginning, the messaging became real-time. You could see the mother in Bihar typing her reply and she could do it in the market while haggling with a vegetable-seller. The idea of the group merged families and communities onto this phenomenon. The communication was “in-house”, limited to the group you were part of and that made the environment secure.

Earlier, if a 60-year-old suddenly felt wist­ful about someone in college, he had to scour Facebook and send a friend request. With WhatsApp, a group was already formed of his college friends and he was added and could now directly interact. The world had become closer in unimaginable ways at a personal lev­el. Every connection of the past that one had thought was done and dusted, had resurfaced in the form of a group where you were ushered in. Many benefits were reaped. Communities could coordinate and communicate to a degree that wasn’t possible before. For instance, take any non-professional association and their main medium of making members aware about activities is usually through a WhatsApp group. If a sport club decides to hold a cricket tournament, then a new group will be formed for that specific event. When teams are formed, each will have a group of their own. The organ­isers and captains of each of the teams might have one to discuss rules and schedules. A key reason why such groups are effective is the privacy underpinning it. What happens in Rome must remain in Rome and the world had no business knowing it. WhatsApp was deliberate in its emphasis on this aspect and made chats end-to-end encrypted. You could speak with abandon in theory.

Yet another use of such groups is as a sup­port system for its members. An interesting, if questionable, instance of it was in Tamil Nadu recently when a couple who were having their third child, decided that it was not necessary to go to a hospital or get medical assistance for the delivery. Instead, they used the instruc­tions of a WhatsApp group to do it at home. The delivery was successful but they got into trouble after putting up posts online recount­ing their experience. It got the attention of the state health authorities. What the couple did might be dangerous to emulate but the value that such communities provide was evident.

The promised land is a useful, but not an entirely happy place and in that it doesn’t just mimic the real world and its relations but also amplifies it. How many friends can’t stand each other now because their politics no longer match and they slugged it out in a WhatsApp group, first civilly and then stridently? If one person in a group has a different ideology from the major­ity, it is worse because the rest gang up on him. This wouldn’t happen if they were meeting face-to-face because there is requirement for courtesies. Offline, such behaviour would be recognised as a form of juvenile bullying even if they thought their politics were more virtuous. But because arguments on the mobile screen are essentially happening with the label of a name instead of a face, it doesn’t feel wrong to revile someone because they hold a different set of beliefs. You feel you never knew this person, except that you always did. You just didn’t think it was that important earlier to be his judge. When freethinking and open discussion is attacked, the group often ends up either as a place of raucous disagreement or an echo chamber, the latter being more likely because most people tire of arguments.

THE WHATSAPP GROUP is a private square because there is a limit to how many members there can be in one. Initially, it used to be 256, now it is 1,024. Because everyone is in so many groups, infor­mation which is thought to be private soon becomes public by the alchemy of forwards. And then that can become a powerful form of public messag­ing. Unfortunately, it is most potent when it comes to disinformation. When someone sends a fake forward, it does not necessarily have to be to start a riot but if enough people do it, then it can start one. During Covid-19, groups were rife with information about all kinds of quackeries for the virus. There is now a term for the gullibility of believing forwards—a student of WhatsApp University. On the other hand, during the pandemic, the same groups were also useful to make members aware about where slots were available for vaccines. WhatsApp groups are used for social work, from creating awareness about civic issues to agitating for public causes. It can gather interested people in one place and mobilise them to act. All political parties use it, especially during elections. Their strategists have a group, so do grassroots workers. Groups are also made of potential voters to exhort them to come out and vote. They spread rumours about opposing parties too. The sword, as always, is double-edged, and now that the age of artificial intelligence and deepfakes is here, both information and misinformation will become much more formidable.

I look at my own WhatsApp groups and realise that in some I am very ac­tive, often the driver of conversations. In others, I don’t type a word. There is even a term for such a person—a lurker. I am not entirely to blame. There are so many groups I am part of that I no longer keep count and how much energy can anyone have to be constantly engaged with every community he is in. They all seemed pertinent at the time of going in, but not so much later. Lurkers only consume from the group. In a real community, either it would get too uncom­fortable for a lurker to stay on, or the rest of those there would try to make the member more involved. On the WhatsApp group, no such thing happens. And yet, even the groups where I lurk have significance. There is always information and occasionally some of it is germane. There are many from my past whom I will never be in touch with but their lives and ideas still interest me. They remain on my peripheral vision, a constant reminder of all that I was and am. Our lives are an ecosystem of the distant and near, of the past and the present. The WhatsApp group is that snapshot of it.

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