Shoot the messenger!
Don’t be fooled, WhatsApp is Social Media
In every moment of alienation with technology, there exists an underlying reminder that things weren’t always this way. This then gives way to a secondary alienation that asks, what is the way things actually are? Technology seems to have just happened to us, and the reflection is always catching up. In this discussion, I aim to unravel how WhatsApp, under the guise of a mere messaging app, has subtly sidestepped accountability in the technological transformation of our interpersonal relationships.
If you play word association game with the term social media, you’ll likely hear Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and Facebook. Yet WhatsApp is somehow often granted an exception from this category, as if its status as primarily a messaging app renders it void of the detrimental effects of social media: dopamine-hacking, addiction, unhealthy comparisons, anxiety, misinformation, cyberbullying and deterioration of ‘real-life’ relations. The cunning of WhatsApp and other messaging apps is the way in which its personal nature as a ‘merely’ communication disguises the same mechanisms operative in all social media. This invites us to reflect on how the humble messenger has stealthily infiltrated and refined the whole landscape of human mechanisms of communication.
With this shift, note the effect in how it has reshaped how we interpret and value human connections. Consider, for instance, the expectation in romantic relationships to text or call daily as a sign of ‘healthiness’; the importance placed on birthday message acknowledgments, or active participation in friend group chats as a measure of social engagement. Loyalty, once a deep-rooted emotional commitment, now takes on shades of Zweckrationalität; it has transformed into the efficiency of timely responses and constant availability, a purposeful rationality in maintaining ‘healthy’ connections. The imperative for immediacy has not just transformed, but rationalised our relationships into techno-relationships, where the promptness and pragmatism of our interactions often measure the depth of our bonds.
The spacetime of our social landscape has been demonstrably flattened, posing its subjects with a moral dilemma of infinite potentiality. There’s nothing stopping you from calling your grandparents everyday, to send a stream of memes or potential events to attend to partners and friends ad infinitum. The problem of EEAaO (everything-everywhere-all-at-once) transforms our moral obligations, bringing guilt and shame when we dare not desire the expectations of the infinite.
Our hyper-availability has become oppressive. We used to ‘brb’, log off, or exit the internet. Now, our constant availability disallows us from ‘leaving the internet’. With our phones securing their position as biological extensions of our arms, we are materially demanded an entirely new digital etiquette – yet its explicitness remains infancy. How do we casually end a conversation if it is never really closed? If we are always online, what is the difference between ‘not responding yet’, and ‘ignoring’ or ‘being ghosted’? We have no universal code to understand mechanisms such as ‘last online’, and ‘read receipts’ — and because of this lack of mutual understanding, the anxious interpretation is far too easy to take.
With the amount of loyalty to people that is now indeed possible, might we need more of the opposite? As we struggle to differentiate our ‘real’ reality from the digital one, perhaps it is necessary to embrace some form of disloyalty in our digital personas to prevent the complete absorption of our true selves into the digital realm. Could deliberately increasing our sense of alienation in the digital sphere enhance the value we place on non-digital experiences?
The personal isn’t personal anyway. WhatsApp’s imperative that its messaging is ‘personal’ and ‘intimate’ creates an adverse effect that doing anything else feels like a betrayal to one’s authenticity. Yet no one is identical to their self, let alone their WhatsApp Self. WhatsApp does not reveal authenticity, but only the self that is translated, and often misinterpreted through the instant message. Here, the digital is analogous to how much of social interaction takes place in the ‘non-digital.’
Everyday communication is based on the false assumption that the ‘I’ of a statement is equal to the subject that executes this speech. Lacan notes that in human speech, the sender is simultaneously the receiver, hearing their own words to themselves. When I make a claim, ‘I am hungry’, I as a subject also hear that message relayed to me. This effect signals a split in the subject — there is the subject that speaks the message, and also one that hears it: hence, the subject of statement and enunciation. The digital avatar redoubles this effect! We not only falsely identify with our ego, ie. the ‘I’ that I suppose myself to be, but the ‘I’ of the instant message. Take note the next time you send a message on WhatsApp, and see those words appear on a screen — are they truly yours? When you feel the anxiety to respond faster, smarter, funnier; who is compelling you to be the instant subject that the messenger wants you to be?
Just like you never have access to yourself, so too is access to the other barred. Our conversation partners are inevitably filtered through the lenses of language, societal norms, and our personalised perceptions of these. The ever-present language barrier ensures miscommunication, leaving us uncertain if our intended message is accurately received. WhatsApp adds another layer to this complexity with its glass screen, amplifying the inherent constraints of language. We are confronted with mere words on a screen, stripped of context, body language, and vocal inflection — just words, and nothing more, perhaps an emoji 🙈. In this digital dialogue, the ‘other’ is not only inaccessible, existing merely as a projection of our ego-driven interpretations, but the digital ‘other’ also exists in a translated state, conflated with the non-digital other. The effect is a restructuring, deterioration or transformation of our egoic projections of the other through its digital manifestation!
The original misidentification and misrecognition of the other is an inherent aspect of our (historically contingent) human experience. The digital misidentification is one that I hope can remain nonessential. We must be vigilant of the adverse effects in conflating the subject and its digital existence, including the role that platforms like the humble WhatsApp play in support this phenomenon. Where previously the messenger escaped most culpability, we must now in fact, shoot the messenger!
