There’s a mood going around the social media space these days. Well, it’s always been there (think TBT) but the time granted to many of us under lockdown has caused it to pervade all social spaces, including that most insidious one of all—WhatsApp.
Or maybe it’s just my own family, stemming mainly from a recently-retired spouse who has decided to turn family archeologist and dig into the photo archives, unearthing gems that some of us would have preferred lay buried, maybe to be discovered long after our own time. This tidal wave of nostalgia that’s breaking across all my family WhatsApp groups is partly driven by his daily morning photo uploads that have replaced the floral Good Morning messages that have fortunately become passé. So, there’s a train of chubby baby pictures (causing my own children to silently face-palm) and faded black-and-white wedding pictures of previous generations and numerous group photographs that unleash a volley of “who is...?” queries and responses from the elders in the group. Being an early riser, he does his quiet scanning and uploading in the morning, way before the birds begin their chirping, and when I get around to looking at the notifications on my phone, they are already many-score deep with notes of appreciation and reminiscence.
Our family groups are multi-generational, with members ranging in age from the late eighties to the early twenties. I suspect those younger than 25 have forbade their parents from adding them to the groups, or if they are present, they lurk in the shadows, often back-chanelling amongst themselves as their elders embarrass them (and themselves) with memories they’d rather not share. The digitally savvy young, I’ve discovered, are far more selective about who they share stuff with (and it’s most often not family).
Family WhatsApp groups have gotten the bad rap for being forums for fake news and unverified forwards, as well as uncomfortable political dynamics. But they can also be congregational spaces that generate warmth and nostalgic reminiscing, and there’s been something about this present moment that has encouraged this mood. Freed from long commutes and strict deadlines, some of us now have a bit of time to actually catch up with family and friends. My extended family has been a relatively late entrant to the WhatsApp culture, the groups having been formed entirely as a result of this new-found pocket of time. But in the past weeks, there has been a steady exchange of messages on these groups, with three generations chipping in, commenting on photographs and sharing childhood memories, giving the young ones a sense of summer vacations past, and the older ones a way of reliving good times.
There’s also something different about the photographs shared on the group. Coming from an era when the photograph was very much an occasional memento, a placeholder for a special event, these offer pathways to specific recollections. Even when posed and self-conscious, they contain stories that offer access to family histories in ways quite different from a mobile phone photo stream—where one day can yield scores of frames, as opposed to one or two sepia-tinted pictures from a family summer spent with the entire brood of cousins in the grandparents’ home.
Anecdotes spill out of the frames, generating good natured ribbing among the older and curious questions from the younger, and for a moment, we can make-believe that we are in that old house in Bangalore again, or on Juhu beach on a sultry evening, just being a family.
There’s an interesting and unexpected dynamic at play here. We are all in one small, contained space. There is no pressure to say something or be visible (unlike in a Zoom call where we sit silently in awkward boxes or try to intervene in a badly coordinated non-conversation). You can either type your two paisa worth or smile quietly at the exchange, and still feel like you are part of the group. Some scholars of digital communication argue that platforms like WhatsApp make it possible to sustain intergenerational family connections over distance (and my family—perhaps like many others--is spread across four continents) because they allow for short, frequent “phatic” communication that can be low on content but still play an affective role.
It may not make up for being able to see each other, given that in a family like mine it is practically impossible to find the time and the means to be in one place simultaneously. But looking at those old pictures and engaging in silly commentary makes us feel like we are part of something, a continuity, and whatever our politics, whatever our different orientations, there are things we can laugh at and chatter about—together. And in the process, we recover a little bit of the magic of past moments of joy, and a bit of ourselves that we had forgotten in the process of growing older, busier, preoccupied with the business of making a life.
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