HONORS THESIS RESEARCH · KNOX COLLEGE
India's telecom revolution brought smartphones to hundreds of millions in just a decade. But adoption of new technology is never neutral. In Pune, India, I discovered that WhatsApp wasn't reshaping how people communicate. It was making visible the invisible boundaries they already maintained between different social worlds. The thesis examines how people transfer offline relationships into digital spaces, performing different versions of themselves in different groups to maintain social coherence in a life that now happens across online and offline simultaneously.
The Research Context
Between 2000 and 2016, India went from the 34th highest number of mobile phone subscribers to second behind China. Pune in particular became a hub for technology workers, migrants, and a newly emerging middle class. By 2016, 160 million out of 220 million smartphone users in India had active WhatsApp accounts. But adoption statistics reveal nothing about how people actually use these tools in their daily lives.
The key question was simple: when people move their existing relationships onto a digital platform, what changes? On the surface, WhatsApp is just a messaging app. But the moment you create a group chat, you are making explicit the social boundaries that previously existed only implicitly. You are declaring who is "in" and who is "out." And you are creating a space where everyone can see how everyone else communicates, introducing new possibilities for misunderstanding, performance, and meaning-making.
How do people manage their offline relationships when those relationships migrate to an online space? And what happens to identity when you have to perform for multiple audiences simultaneously?
My Responsibilities
This was a solo research project for my honors thesis at Knox College. I was responsible for the entire research lifecycle:
- Designing the research methodology and getting approval from the institutional review board
- Conducting 13 in-depth interviews (70-90 minutes each) with WhatsApp users from diverse backgrounds in Pune
- Spending 20 days conducting participant observation in people's homes, offices, restaurants, buses, and public spaces, observing how they actually used their phones in context
- Documenting and analysing WhatsApp message content, user interface patterns, and group structures
- Synthesising ethnographic fieldwork data with interview transcripts to identify emergent patterns
- Writing a 60-page honors thesis and presenting findings to a faculty committee
Research Approach
Combining Interviews with Ethnographic Immersion
The core of the methodology was pairing in-depth interviews with participant observation. During interviews, I asked people to walk me through their WhatsApp groups while we scrolled together. This was not about collecting self-report data. It was about watching people's actual behaviour, listening to how they rationalised their choices, and observing moments when their self-perception didn't align with their actions. When Mrs. Joshi said she sends "good morning" messages to stay connected but then revealed she never actually types anything herself, that gap between self-perception and reality became the insight.
Participant Observation Across Contexts
I did not just sit in interviews. I spent time with participants in their daily routines. I rode the bus with Vanita while she checked her phone. I sat in office break rooms. I observed how people physically held their devices, the speed at which they scrolled, who they asked for help understanding messages, and which groups they checked first. This contextual observation revealed behaviour that interview questions alone would have missed. I discovered that the "good morning" messages that people claimed were meaningful actually functioned as a kind of ritual that required minimal thought.
Analysing Boundary Making Through Multiple Lenses
I approached the data through the lens of boundary theory from sociology. The idea is that groups maintain coherence by defining who is in and who is out. But on digital platforms, those boundaries become visible in new ways. Mrs. Pawaskar uses two physical phones to separate her family group from her household staff. That is boundary making made explicit through technology. Other participants used group names, display pictures, and subgroup creation to signal membership. By analysing who created these boundaries, how they enforced them, and what happened when people violated them, I could see how the platform was reshaping social relationships.
Mapping Identity Performance Across Groups
I drew on Erving Goffman's dramaturgical theory: the idea that social life is like theatre, and we all perform different characters for different audiences. The thesis argues that WhatsApp groups force this performance to become explicit and visible. Mrs. Joshi performs as a "modern grandmother" in her family group. In her walking group, she performs as a socially conscious citizen sharing political content. In the subgroup with her closest friends, she performs as a gossip and trusted confidant. These are not false versions of herself. They are all genuinely her. But the platform structures when and how each version appears.
Content as Cultural Artefact
I analysed the actual messages, images, videos, and media people shared. The research appendix includes examples of "good morning" messages. Looking at dozens of these messages, you see patterns: religious imagery for some groups, inspirational quotes for others, memes about current events. These are not random. They are carefully curated to match what each group expects. By analysing the content people created and shared, I could see the invisible rules governing each group.
What We Found
Technology makes implicit social boundaries explicit.
In offline life, the boundaries between different social worlds are maintained through space and time. You are with your family on Sunday, your colleagues on Monday, your friends on Friday. Each context carries its own norms and expectations. But WhatsApp groups exist all at once. To maintain the boundaries between these worlds, people have to make explicit choices: which group gets which content, which version of yourself you perform, what you say or don't say. Mrs. Pawaskar uses two phones. Other participants use secret subgroups. Some quietly lurk in groups without posting. These are all strategies for maintaining boundaries that offline life maintained for you automatically.
People transfer their offline relationships and hierarchies directly online, reproducing existing power structures.
The research reveals how digital spaces are not somehow "flattening" or "democratising." The groups that form on WhatsApp are built from pre-existing offline relationships. If Mrs. Gogate is subordinate to her mother-in-law offline, she will be subordinate in the family group chat. The platform does not change that hierarchy. It amplifies it by making every interaction visible to everyone. The solution is not the platform. It is creating subgroups where Mrs. Gogate can find voice. But that requires her to actively create a space separate from the larger family structure.
The performance of identity happens continuously through message selection and curation.
Mrs. Joshi cannot read or type English. But she sends carefully curated religious images to her family group every morning. She has learned which images are "historically correct" and which violate the group's expectations. She doesn't create this content. She selects it from a universe of images available to her. But that act of selection is an act of identity performance. She is communicating: I am spiritual, I am family-oriented, I care about accuracy. Mr. Sahebrao sends "good morning" messages to his boss as a way of saying "I will be at work today." He sends video messages to his illiterate colleagues because they cannot read text. Same greeting, different media.
Group chat emerges as a "third place," one that reproduces offline power structures and cultural expectations.
Sociologists use the concept of "third place" to describe spaces that are neither home nor work: coffee shops, parks, libraries. WhatsApp groups function like third places in some ways. They offer a space for informal conversation outside the constraints of work or home. But they reproduce the social hierarchies of home and work. You cannot escape power dynamics by moving to WhatsApp. You bring them with you. The only exception is when people deliberately create subgroups with explicit different norms.
Demographic and Mindset Personas
From the 13 participants, I developed demographic and mindset personas that mapped how WhatsApp adoption varied across age, education, caste, class, and literacy. These personas became the framework for understanding how the same platform is experienced very differently depending on someone's social position.
The Digital Native: young, college-educated, IT workers in Pune's tech sector. For them, WhatsApp is seamless. They move between personal and professional groups fluidly, their literacy and technical fluency giving them easy access to all platform features.
The Bridge Builders: middle-aged professionals navigating between traditional family structures and modern work environments. Mrs. Gogate, a teacher and housewife, manages multiple group identities. Mrs. Salaskar, a stay-at-home spouse of a journalist, uses WhatsApp to maintain careful boundaries between family, professional, and friendship groups. They are acutely aware of performing different selves in different spaces.
The Reluctant Adopters: older adults (60+) forced onto WhatsApp by family pressure. Mrs. Joshi, who cannot read English, had to teach herself the alphabet from news broadcasts to understand group messages. Mr. Pawaskar, skeptical of the platform's impact on relationships, eventually stopped using it altogether. For them, WhatsApp represents a loss of control over communication norms they understood offline.
The Power Navigators: people with less formal education navigating hierarchy and power on the platform. Mr. Sahebrao, a factory manager who rose from the assembly line, uses WhatsApp strategically to maintain professional relationships with his boss while managing communication differently with colleagues who cannot read. His use is highly conscious and deliberate, shaped by his position as the link between management and workers.
The Class and Caste Gatekeepers: highly educated women from the highest castes with significant wealth who use WhatsApp as a tool for maintaining social boundaries. Mrs. Pawaskar uses two physical phones to separate her "iPhone contacts" (family) from her "Samsung contacts" (everyone else), with explicit language about which people are worthy of seeing into her life and which are not.
Recognition
The thesis won the Best Honors Thesis Award at Knox College in 2018. It was one of only 15 honors projects completed in the graduating class that year. The project was approved by a committee of faculty advisors including the department chair of Anthropology-Sociology and an outside examiner from Howard University's media studies program.
What I Would Do Differently
I would have collected more explicit data on exclusion and conflict. Most of the data focuses on how people maintain boundaries and manage identity. But there are moments when those boundaries break down, when communication fails, when people send messages they regret or groups dissolve. A more systematic approach to studying conflict within groups would have deepened the analysis of how power actually operates online.
I also would have followed participants over a longer period. This was a one-month sprint. If I had returned to Pune six months or a year later and re-interviewed people, I could have traced how groups evolve, how identity performance changes as people become more familiar with the platform, and whether the boundaries people maintain remain stable or shift. The research captures a moment in time, but identity and relationships are not static.