WhatsApp, India and Older Indians
India is culturally rich. Culture plays a big role in the lives of Indians and WhatsApp has become a cultural thing in India, especially for older Indians. Young Indians are hooked to Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. But for older Indians, WhatsApp is the ultimate social network.
From what I have been reading lately, I am convinced that older Indian’s are addicted to WhatsApp.
An excerpt from Older Indians Drive Millennials Crazy On WhatsApp. This Is Why They’re Obsessed
She rekindled dusty relationships and joined at least a dozen groups, including a family group, a group for work colleagues, a group for school friends, a group for organic farmers, and another for environmentalists. Soon, my mother was spending half a dozen hours each day glued to her dinky Android phone, blasting her WhatsApp groups with forwards, and watching almost every GIF and video she received.
Things have gone so far that If you don’t respond to their messages, they would get emotionally upset with you.
Many of these forwards ended up in my WhatsApp too. Sometimes, I got them twice because there were some groups we had in common. At first, I skimmed through, replying with a quick :) . But their volume increased so rapidly that I was soon forced to stop replying entirely — there were simply too many. A few months later, my father called. “Your mother is sulking,” he said. “You haven’t been reading or replying to her WhatsApp forwards.” I was taken aback. Mom and I had been talking at least a couple of times a week on the phone. Still, she perceived me ignoring her on WhatsApp as a sort of personal affront.
“I’m emotionally invested in WhatsApp,” Mom explained when I called her to apologize. “And I was hurt because you ignored me there.”
India may be the fastest growing smartphone market in the world, but one in three smartphone users in India run out of space daily, according to a survey by data-storage firm Western Digital Corp. In comparison, only one in 10 smartphones run out of space daily in the US.
A recent report in Wall Street Journal explored another ‘pandemic’ that is on the rise — ‘Good morning’ messages that Indian WhatsApp users were sending each other. Google researchers in Silicon Valley were trying to figure out why so many smartphones in India were freezing up. So when they leveraged their data to understand Indian user’s smartphone habits, they found that “good morning” images were among the main causes of the problem.
To help deal with India deal with “Good Morning” WhatApp messages Google unveiled, app Files Go. The app’s premise is simple, Google would use its vast image database and Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools to help users categorise and erase images they longer need. The app has more than 10 million downloads so far, with more users in India than any other country. It has cleared up on average more than 1 gigabyte of data per user (and of course they will get more data now). This will help users search out and delete all good-morning messages at once.
To me it’s just very fascinating to see how technologies play different roles in different countries.
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