ABSTRACT
While WhatsApp has a high penetration use in South-East Asia at large, it is uniquely popular in Singapore, which boasts one of the highest smartphone ownership rates in the world. More crucially, the mainstreaming and institutionalisation of WhatsApp into everyday society have also been facilitated by its adoption and deployment by the Singapore government as an important dissemination tool and outlet for citizen feedback. In particular, intergenerational family chat groups are prevalent in Singapore society, and have become an important site for understanding digital communication cultures and user norms in the context of private messaging groups. Against the backdrop of contentious chain mail being spread widely, and the proliferation of vernacular meme cultures that require specific nuance and/or digital literacies to decode, WhatsApp has also become a space ripe with unwitting or well-intended misinformation. This is especially as intergenerational family chat groups use WhatsApp groups as tools to practice networks of care. To shed light on the politics and socio-cultural contexts of private messaging group cultures in Singapore, and to reflect on the research regimes when conducting studies in the context of a society with a paternalistic government, this chapter focuses on the use of WhatsApp by intergenerational family units in family chat groups. Specifically, through the scroll back method and personal interviews, we have focused on a group of Singapore-based citizens and residents, and a group of Australia-based Singapore migrants and diaspora to tease out the socio-technical contexts of conducting research on WhatsApp in Singapore society.
