Normative becoming in the digital sphere: WhatsApp parents’ groups in Chilean education

Abstract

Digital communicational technologies, such as WhatsApp, have been part of schools both before and during the pandemic. This article explores the normative emergence of being a student, a parent, and a teacher in the use of parents’ WhatsApp groups. In Chile, this digital application is widely used by the population, and it is particularly important for school communities. Based on interviews conducted with teachers and parents, and a theoretical approach based on science and technology studies, the results show that students are constantly labeled as “good” or “bad” without nuance, which produces stereotypes, and parents are also labeled in a binary way, with one group of alarmists and one of relaxed parents, where counter criticisms emerge, while teachers are seen as an extension of the schools and are expected to be constantly present. Digital communication technologies mediate these interactions and open up a new level of interaction, with standards and meanings enabled by the features of the application. We discuss these results, emphasizing that the normativities of these becomings are intertwined in the digital sphere, and using a mapping visualization of the analysis, we show how normativity acts ubiquitously and produces constantly changing expectations of how one should be for those in the group. The mapping exercise shows that the main relationship between the three becomings is emotion, so we conclude that, on the understanding that affect exceeds individuality and represents intensities online, normativities are also incorporated as affective responses in the parents’ WhatsApp group.