Offline Strangers, Online Friends: Bridging Classroom Gender Segregation with WhatsApp

摘要

Mobile Instant Messaging (MIM) apps such as WhatsApp are heralding new communication behaviors amongst students in peri-urban India. From an ethnographic study of a co-ed engineering college, we describe and analyze the role of WhatsApp in both engendering and balancing the ripples caused by cross gender communication. Through in-depth interviews and immersive participant observations in both physical as well as digital spaces, we show how WhatsApp emerges as the backbone of student interactions in a gender segregated academic environment. In analyzing social conditions and identifying structural features of WhatsApp that led to its bottoms up appropriation, our study presents possibilities for educators and designers aiming to create technology enabled collaborative spaces between people otherwise hemmed in by social norms from reaching out to one another.