Political Posters Reveal a Tension in WhatsApp Platform Design: An Analysis of Digital Images From India’s 2019 Elections

Abstract

This article examines the effects of WhatsApp as a mode of dissemination of political posters. It found that platform affordances that control the crafting and dissemination of political messages open up the possibility of vague political messaging by conforming to the social media’s visual culture and limit the spread of these messages, restricting the ability to organically gather support for a political cause. Despite the growing appeal of social media in political campaigns, social media messages when used by individuals and small, independent social media groups, who are not a part of a larger, organized political party or movement, have little influence on electoral decisions of voters about a political cause that faces weak public support. This was discussed in the context of electoral results of the Leftist political party in India in 2019 national elections. The paper then contributes to our understanding of the extent of the influence of social media platforms on political media messages.

Keywords

WhatsApp political posters India Left elections new media

Introduction

“This is a fight for survival,” declared an artistic poster in Bengali tagged #Vote4Left and shared on WhatsApp ahead of Indian general elections held in April 2019. The digital poster showed a figure set in a dramatic background of red and yellow planting a flag (Appendix Figure A1). Color symbolism here when read through semiotic theory places the brightness of red and yellow against the opacity of black, “hope” offered by Leftist politics against the “danger” of right-wing politics. It is a binary that appeals to the obvious (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2002). This digital poster was one of the nine that was shared on WhatsApp by Leftist supporters in West Bengal, India. These nine posters, some of which were tagged #Vote4Left, aimed to gather support for the Left parties in the 2019 national elections. This corpus will be the focus of study of the paper. These digitally painted political posters were not official posters of the Left parties. They are situated in a wider effort by supporters of political parties and activists to bridge the gap between traditional uses of media to reach voters such as through paper posters and wall-lettering, and micro-targeted digital forms through WhatsApp, Facebook, or Twitter that could be official or unofficial (Das 2016, 2019; Giglio 2019). Visual political communication in India, especially West Bengal, mainly takes the form of wall paper posters, graffiti, and hand-painted wall-lettering (Figures A2–A4) (Biswas 2006; Chaudhuri 2019). This paper aims to analyze the specific ways the production of WhatsApp messages and the pathways are affected by the platform’s technological design. The term ‘Platform design’ is used in this paper to mean a configuration of platform features (Tura et al. 2018). The aim is to show that these designs afford possibilities but ultimately constrain discourses. This paper makes this argument specifically in relation to production of micro-targeted messages in WhatsApp and suggests that these constraints ultimately limit political communication. Existing scholarship on social media’s constraining effects suggest that such effects are not necessarily negative and complement the affordances (Cammaerts 2015), or that these effects are felt during the process of consumption (Witkemper et al. 2012). Another study points to the constraints of mobile-based social media in general with respect to participation and privacy of users, information quality, and usage skills and their implications in global health (Pimmer and Tulenko 2016). This paper will contribute to the understanding of the relationship between technological design of social media platforms, such as WhatsApp, and the specific ways the messages and their dissemination are affected by the platform’s designs.

Political posters, moreover, has been analyzed from various points of reference: their visual esthetics (Maasri 2012; Sturken 2009), framing of the messages (Parry 2010; Teo 2004), their impact on voters (Lee and Campbell 2016; Van Den Bulck 1993), and political economy of the production of these posters (Maasri 2008). In the context of India, recent studies of visual communication in election campaigns have been largely restricted to the studies of political posters of the two largest national parties, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Indian National Congress. One of the studies noted the move toward image-based election campaigns on paper posters and billboards especially during the 2014 Indian election (Willnat et al. 2017). BJP’s use of merchandise, 3D holograms and photographs have also been studied (Khan 2019). Despite this body of literature around political posters, few studies focus on the technological aspect of the process of production and dissemination of digital posters. To address this gap, this paper deals with an analysis of messages in artistic digital political posters and their dissemination using semiotic theory and new media theory, focusing on three areas: the posters’ visual aspects; use of text; and mode of dissemination. While WhatsApp’s distribution power to reach users makes it an apparent choice of dissemination for digital assembly, the artists must navigate the possibilities and the constraints that it affords in both creating the posters and disseminating them. A tension then arises from WhatsApp’s platform design, which seemingly liberates but ultimately limits the political communication of these posters.

The emphasis here is more on content and dissemination of the digital posters and less on the digital platform’s technological design aspects. The overall research question is: To what extent are visual messages in digitally shared artistic political posters constrained by the platform design of WhatsApp to set limits on the posters’ political communication? In other words, what is conveyed through the posters and what is not (or cannot be) said?

It is important to establish the relationship between the platform design aspects and the content of the posters. The paper uses semiotic theory and new media studies rather than platform design theories to explain limitations and affordances of WhatsApp platform design because the goal is to study the effects of platform design on specific poster content, that is, the platform’s media ecosystem. Backend technological features of platforms have been variously studied as platform design or digital architecture as well as affordances (Bossetta 2018; Burgess et al. 2016; Krafft and Donovan 2020). Some scholars have argued that platform design or platform architecture underpins affordances (Bossetta 2018). Burgess et al. (2016) have argued that design features of platforms cannot be isolated from the concept of affordances, which they define as “action possibilities made available to users by means of technology”. Each social media platform has its own materiality or affordances that mediate the messages and give rise to its own media ecosystem. These affordances include filters for Instagram, #hashtag and @retweet buttons in Twitter, Facebook’s “Like” feature with its several emoticons, and end-to-end encryption of WhatsApp. According to Ian Hutchby, affordances can be enabling or constraining (Hutchby 2001). This paper studies how platform design of WhatsApp shapes its affordances that in turn shape user behavior (Kreiss et al. 2018). It specifically analyzes political posters from the perspective of WhatsApp’s technological affordances involving (1) its unique functionality, which influences media production, and (2) network structure, which affects how its users interact with each other. The aim is to argue that the platform’s technical objects have an epistemic impact over social interactions by shaping the messages its creators can create as well as by shaping the pathways of these messages. These categories of functionality and network structure of the platform are not unique to WhatsApp but the specific features within these categories, such as the ability of its user to send messages to a target selective audience within a private group and the ability of these same messages to spill over to unintended end users, give rise to WhatsApp’s distinctive media ecosystem and what its design affords. All these nine posters specifically targeted at the elections were circulated on WhatsApp and only some of them were shared on an alternate platform, Facebook. This paper studies only the posters’ media ecosystem on WhatsApp as the latter affords an ability to study the complete group of posters. This, along with the fact that WhatsApp is a relatively understudied platform due to the difficulty of securing data circulated on the platform makes it an intriguing field of study. The fact that these posters blur the boundaries between paper and the digital media, holding traces of both the media, and this researcher’s advantage of knowing the social and cultural aspects of the language of the posters make them worthy of study. Given the role of art and text in the history of Left parties’ posters (Bonnell 1999), these artistic posters present a unique case study—compared to posters and billboards from other parties—even though these are from Left supporters and not Left parties. These posters co-opt the symbols of the Left parties and hence signal a widening usage and implications for purposes of digital mobilization and assembly. Finally, these artistic posters are among the first to retain the format of a poster that is circulated for a digital audience in India, giving rise to an opportunity to examine the changing modes of political communication in the context of elections.

Context: Rise of WhatsApp in Political Campaigns

Research on WhatsApp private groups have shown that the platform is emerging as a powerful tool to organize digital activism and political participation (Stefania and Barbosa 2020). Studies show that WhatsApp private groups allow activists to safeguard themselves from the pressures of frontline organizing during political movements (Treré 2020). WhatsApp videos and text messages were effective in addressing young voters in Brazil (Moura and Michelson 2017). Political organizations, amateur as well as official, and political parties have used WhatsApp in successful campaigns in the public sphere, such as the #YoSoy132 movement in Mexico in 2012 (Treré 2015). The growing body of research on social media usage in Indian politics has revolved around the increasing role of WhatsApp, Facebook, and Twitter in election campaigns and national political parties’ social initiatives (Narayanan et al. 2019; Neyazi et al. 2016; Rodrigues and Niemann 2017), role of YouTube, Twitter, and digital media in linking electoral politics to social issues (Punathambekar 2015), civil society’s use of Facebook to mobilize people in social movements (Eipe et al. 2012; Kumar 2015), or Twitter’s role in the rise of Hindutva (Udupa 2018). Such debates, however, leave unanswered the extent of WhatsApp’s particular influence on political messages.

In India, WhatsApp is the most widely used messaging platform (“Digital 2019: India” 2019). It had around four hundred million users in July 2019 (Singh 2019a). Individuals use WhatsApp to talk, create invitation-only groups to chat and share texts, images, and videos. Within and outside such groups, users cross-migrate content from other individuals and groups. During 2019 elections in India, WhatsApp allowed private interactions in eleven Indian languages, out of forty languages that WhatsApp supports worldwide on iPhone and up to sixty on Android worldwide (Pathak 2019). It thus allows a cultural preference that is not available on other social media platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat. In India it is common to be members of multiple WhatsApp groups such as family, friends, work, or personal interest groups.

Along with Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, WhatsApp played an important role in organizing supporters during 2014 and 2019 election campaigns of various political parties in India. Several scholars and media reports termed the 2019 general elections in India as the “WhatsApp elections” to refer to the extent to which the platform was used during the elections campaigns to address specific user groups (Murgia et al. 2019). The application was used to spread disinformation as well as vitriolic political messages through images, videos, and audio files during the elections (Bengani 2019).

Leftist Politics in West Bengal

For the Leftist supporters in West Bengal the timing of the WhatsApp usage by the artists was crucial. It came at a time of considerable political weakness of the Left parties in the state. The leading member of the Leftist parties’ coalition in West Bengal, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), did not win any seats in the Parliament in 2019 national elections and got only two seats in 2014, down from nine seats in 2009 and twenty-six seats in the 2004 elections. Until recently, the party along with a coalition of Leftist parties won the majority in consecutive state elections from 1977 until 2011. The support base for Left parties in West Bengal had substantially and steadily weakened within a decade following land acquisition controversies for industrialization and ineffective mobilizations from around 2007 (Nath 2020). This erosion of Left’s vote bank coincided with the rise of the nationalist and right-of-center BJP and the All India Trinamool Congress in the state. BJP increased its number of seats from two in 2014 to an unprecedented eighteen in the state in 2019. The amateur artists behind the digital posters and other Leftist supporters who helped disseminate them in 2019 were also competing against a more organized, cash-rich, and technologically efficient social media strategy of BJP. The right-wing party continues to invest large sums of money in dedicated information technology cells to push their rhetoric on various social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Instagram (Chaturvedi 2016). A detailed analysis of BJP’s digital mobilization is beyond the scope of this paper, but to give a sense of BJP’s WhatsApp strategy it is important to cite that for state elections in Bihar in late 2020, BJP had already formed around fifty thousand WhatsApp groups by July 2020 and planned to form twenty-two thousand more to reach out to voters in every neighborhood (Shanker 2020).

In West Bengal, 2019 elections were not the first time that political activists used mobile phones to mobilize people. Studies have shown that during the land acquisition conflict of 2007 to 2008 in West Bengal, political party members had actively used mobile phones to organize and resist (Tenhunen 2011). The usage of mobile phones for political activism, however, added another dimension to political mobilization through the application of social media platforms during the past decade in West Bengal and outside. In Kerala, a Left bastion in India, Leftist political activists used memes targeting opposition parties on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, ShareChat, and TikTok to reach voters during the 2019 elections (Bose 2019a; Kumar 2019; Raj 2016). BJP, which also deployed a competing social media strategy in Kerala, failed to win any seats, increasing its vote share by only 2 percent. This reinforces the argument that social media strategy of political parties can only complement ground support and mobilization, especially in electoral politics in India (Bond et al. 2012; Comunello and Anzera 2012; Neyazi et al. 2016). A further detailed analysis of Kerala’s Leftist parties’ social media strategy was not undertaken due to language limitations.

Theorizing WhatsApp Poster Analysis

The visual messages in the posters are studied through semiotic theory as it helps analyze the grammar of these posters. The term “grammar” here is used in the sense operationalized by Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen. Grammar comes into play during the process of motivated sign-making as the creators connect signifiers and signifieds, negotiating conventions and constraints, “which are socially imposed on our making of signs” (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2005, 12). Kress and Van Leeuwen (2005) define “grammar” as the social resources of a particular group, their knowledge of these resources and their usage of these resources in a general way (p. 4). This definition of grammar is also helpful to study the constraints on the creators of the political posters posed by not only the conventions of combining signifiers with signifieds that pressure the artists into conformity but also by the conventions of the medium, WhatsApp in this case, by requiring to conform to its stylistic, material, and sociality routines.

To study platform design, the first point to consider is how social media platforms are constructed. Communication studies scholars have pointed out that social media platforms are built on the habits and goals of traditional media (Chun 2011; Gitelman 2006; Golumbia 2009). For the purposes of this paper, social media platforms can be defined as “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of User Generated Content” (Kaplan and Haenlein 2010, 61). According to the social presence theory in media research, the degree of social presence—that is, the acoustic, visual and physical contact (Kaplan and Haenlein 2010) between the entities involved in communication, or, “the degree to which a person is perceived as a ‘real person’ in mediated communication” (Gunawardena 1995, 151)—is an important aspect in communication in social media platforms such as WhatsApp. Social presence can be higher for interpersonal communication than mediated communication, and for synchronous (such as live chat) than asynchronous (such as email) communication (Kaplan and Haenlein 2010). In terms of social processes, communication transactions “that can overcome different frames of reference or clarify ambiguous issues to change understanding in a timely manner are considered rich,” whereas exchanges “that require a long time to enable understanding or that cannot overcome different perspectives are lower in richness” (Daft and Lengel 1986, 560). Ultimately, it is the ability of human beings to “interpret and respond to ambiguity” that makes human social systems much more complex and richer than mechanical systems (Daft and Lengel 1986, 569).

The second point to consider is the effect of “new” media. Chun (2016) sees networks as central to the creation of individuals who constantly seek to be different, someone new, and yet comfortable within the status quo of political and corporate powers. One effect of the rise of such individuals is a replacement of “the mass with the new, the ‘we’ with the YOU. . . . If mass media produced consistent forms to create consistent, coherent audiences, new media thrive on differences to create predictable individuals” (Chun 2016, 18). It is important to distinguish between the mass “we” or “they” and the “YOU” in social media. The “we” produced by mass media is a homogeneous “we,” whereas the YOU produced by social media of Web 2.0 is a heterogeneous YOU, comprising dissimilar interests yet predictable within the neoliberal dreams (Chun 2016).

Third, recent research has found that technology platforms through their own cultural norms, shape the messages they disseminate. WhatsApp is in a unique position where key algorithm currencies, such as “Likes” on Facebook or retweets on Twitter, do not play a role in amplifying a post. The latter can be disseminated across the group where one is a member or to one’s contacts, individually or altogether at once. A message on the platform, therefore, is not at the mercy of whether one gets “Liked.” It reaches everyone to whom it is sent. This affordance of WhatsApp then puts the burden of gatekeeping or the responsibility of reaching the widest possible audience on the disseminator.

Gathering the Data and Research Significance

The paper uses a corpus of nine posters shared through WhatsApp between November 1, 2018, and April 30, 2019. The posters could be classified as those with text and those without text. Those with text revolve around dissent with the ruling central and state governments. This small corpus forms a significant object of study because it symbolizes a bridge between traditional and digital modes of visual political communication, and a turn in the history of posters. Moreover, as historical artifacts, these belong to the category of digital ephemera that despite promises of online permanence are subject to “incompatibility and obsolescence; insecurity and deletion; and obscurity” (Burton 2015). This is especially true for WhatsApp platform where data is ephemeral as well as hard to collect. As such, the study is an attempt to give them a permanence in the history of digital visual political communication so that the effect of platform design of WhatsApp on digital political posters can be studied. These posters also point to an increased incorporation of technology into the political communication strategy of the Indian Left parties to reach a wider and younger audience to stay relevant in India (Joy 2019).

The WhatsApp accounts from which these posters were shared belong to Leftist activists and supporters of the Leftist parties and were not accounts of official Leftist parties. This paper studied the posters the researcher received on WhatsApp between November 2018 and April 2019. The Appendix provides these posters. The Appendix also has some samples of official wall-lettering and one sample of paper poster used by CPI(M) in the state. While some of the WhatsApp posters are signed by the artists, the party-sanctioned Leftist wall-lettering or paper posters do not usually carry any artist name.

The focus of the project was not how these posters were received or what discussion these generated, but rather to study how platform design of WhatsApp specifically affected the posters’ messages. As such, it was less important for the researcher to belong to group/s where these were circulated than securing the data. This was also the reason why the artists were not interviewed for this paper or identified. It is also difficult, first, to identify all the artists of these posters and second, to get responses from all of those identified. To eliminate the possibility of relying on a few artists, the research project did not involve their responses. It could, however, be the focus on another research study.

Framing and Interpreting the Leftist Posters

The methodology of this study is built upon theories of semiotics and new media to analyze WhatsApp’s “material affordances,” and “the media ecosystem within which the site operates” (Burgess et al. 2016) as well as the “common resources” of visual communication (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2005) available to the artists of the nine political posters. As Burgess et al. say, these levels build the meaning of the platform’s affordances and reveal future innovations. Herein lies the political possibilities of affordances that frame messages. A study of framing of messages can point to the organization of information that seeks to influence the receiver’s understanding of a situation. In visual messages, such as posters and photographs, framing and meaning creation occurs through basic structures such as the image, accompanying text, and graphic framing devices such as lines, color, and shape (Goldman 1992, 40). The framing process in visual images is more intimate than in textual messages due to a visual imagery’s closeness to the reality, and are therefore, an effective vehicle for ideological messages (Fahmy 2020, 268). But to be receptive of the intended message in a visual image, one needs to have a broad understanding of related images and their meanings (Rose 2001, 127).

To build a discourse of protest aimed against the central (federal) and state (provincial) governments, the creators of these posters drew upon signifiers that include repetition of standard Leftist party symbols, use of color code, and abstract, dramatic visuals. As historian Bonnell (1988) has pointed out, the Communists have always privileged the eye in political education. This endeavor includes posters—the most widely used forms of these visual representations—as well as theater, films, books, and monumental sculpture. While her observation is in the context of the Bolsheviks in their taking of power in 1917, this is true for the Communist parties in India that were influenced by the Soviet and Chinese Communist parties since their early days.

Visual Imagery

The constraining effect of platform design on visual imagery in these posters are manifest in the posters’ broad narratives without any specificity and the functional positioning of party symbols to appeal to an unknown mass audience that is afforded by WhatsApp’s privacy design. If visual imagery involves a basic narrative, these digital posters revolve around narratives of protest. To align them with the Left cause, these posters fall back on the readily identifiable symbols—the sickle, hammer, and star—of the Communist parties, and the use of the color red as the primary color. Party symbols in political posters of India play an important role in easing voters into identification with the parties and connect them with the symbols during ballot (Willnat et al. 2017). In India, scholars have pointed out that color symbolism has been utilized by both Left-wing as well as nationalist parties such as BJP to promote respective parties (Kannangara and Devarapalli 2019). The WhatsApp posters also use standard Communist party practice of pairing of people, male and female, and clustering of people. The traditional Communist party posters used such pairing or clustering to establish relationship between workers or various groups (Bonnell 1999, 28).

These digital posters are abstract and individualistic with few identifiable repertoires of visual imageries, such as folk art, satirical art, or Socialist revolutionary art. They follow the individual artists’ visualization of protest under the umbrella of Leftist political parties. Some of the posters without text depict pairs of individuals against abstract, dramatic landscape (Figures A3, A4, and A5) that is neither urban nor rural (A3), sometimes in an empty landscape (A5), and at other times marching through a landscape lined with tarpaulin-covered shops common in urban and rural India (A8). The landscape is generic with few standout characteristics, and the human figures are non-descript. Another set of posters makes use of the standard party symbols awash in a background of red with stylized figures rising from or propped up against the party symbols (Figures A1, A6, A9). Color is one of the ways in which signifieds are communicated to the receivers of messages (Williamson 1978). Red has been associated with Communist parties as the symbol for blood of the working class, and a force of good (Bonnell 1988). The color red, and the images of sickle, hammer, and star are readily identifiable with the Leftist parties, especially CPI(M), in India. The posters follow an esthetic design but without any overt allegiance to any cause or issue other than a call to support for the Left. When text is present, it calls for action against the ruling government through the ballot or a general support for the Left parties. One of the main platforms for the Left parties’ 2019 election manifesto was the economic policies of the state and central government, but economic themes are not referred to in these posters. A study of official party street art or wall-lettering is outside the scope of this paper, but such art makes ample reference to the state and central government policies to criticize them (A12).

While the artists draw from a few established artistic traditions, they do not develop any new images or symbols for the Left parties. The people depicted in the posters include generic heterogeneous couples, clad in white traditional Indian clothes (A3), or individuals without any identifiable features except for the manner of wearing clothes that could suggest a working-class membership (Figure A4). They do not belong to any of the occupations traditionally identified by the Communist parties such as the factory workers, farmers, or teachers.

Nonconformity with the traditional image of workers, as the Communist parties visualized them to be, for instance, speaks of the blurring of the representation of these occupations. In Bolshevik Russia itself, the image of the worker underwent a change in representation from the 1930s where a youthful and indeterminate image of a worker replaced that of a skilled worker to appeal to a broader mass of people (Bonnell 1999). While the image of the farmer in India still conforms to the image visualized by the Communist party as one wielding a sickle, decimation of factory jobs, especially heavy industries in West Bengal, has almost done away with the factory worker. In West Bengal, which once boasted heavy manufacturing industries, such as mining machinery factories, jute mills, many of the massive public sector factories and jute mills have either closed or have a reduced number of workers to run at a fraction of their capacity. Contracts for new factories such as steel and automobile that were signed by the Left Front government before 2010 were not realized (Nath 2020). Factory jobs and agricultural jobs were replaced by the service sector jobs such as in information technology sector and as support services workers. This class of workers do not yet have a readily identifiable symbolic image in India. The generic and unidentifiable figures in these digital posters speak to their times.

The end-to-end encryption of WhatsApp’s platform design while enables privacy, disables any identifiable marker of the recipient of messages. Even BJP, which uses WhatsApp groups to target voters and harvests massive amounts of public data, can classify them into effective but broad categories such as of caste, religion, income, and age (Singh 2019b). Disseminated over WhatsApp, these posters then represent the generic individual on WhatsApp to reach out to an audience whose political preferences and social positioning are difficult to ascertain. Unlike Facebook or Instagram, where individual users have an account and a polyvalent history of sharing feeds, it is difficult to know for an individual WhatsApp user the preferences of the individual members within a group or of a user outside a group beyond personal knowledge. Unlike Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, it is difficult for an individual WhatsApp user to build own mediatized promotional identity for the public (Hogan 2010). While the individual on WhatsApp has his or her personal political, cultural, religious, and gender preferences among other preferences, he or she also belongs to a mass whose preferences are not necessarily available to the sender of the messages. The individual “YOU” then becomes the plural “YOU” or the generic entity. These digital posters address this generic mass of supporters. On one level these posters avoid being too specific to individual WhatsApp groups, and therefore, is open to the possibility of a general appeal. On another level, by avoiding addressing specific groups the posters lose the opportunity of sending specific messages related to specific social groups.

This then makes the posters doubly problematic. First, they are unable to further or develop any new symbols that can be identified with the Left or Leftist parties or their traditional support bases, such as workers, farmers, and teachers, which can further the party’s cause and spread the image of the party among young people. Second, these digital posters reach an established Leftist supporter base on WhatsApp, and speak to a mass audience that is not categorized into identifiable occupations or even social classes with the intermediate classes between the traditional proletariat and bourgeoisie (Clark et al. 1993) where the messages can be more narrowly targeted. The depictions of protest in these artistic posters tend to generalize the political messages to a support for the Leftist parties.

Text

The absence of or little text in these posters also set these apart from paper posters. Traditional election posters are often text-rich despite the limits of a physical frame (A11). These digital posters at most have a slogan that supports the central idea of protest or support for the Left parties (Figures A1, A6, A9). The sparse use of text in these digital posters is in line with the role of text in the participatory digital culture.

In the online instant messaging world, there is a pre-eminence of images as the mode of communication, and a privileging of the screen over the page (Trotta and Danielson 2011). Text becomes an act of secondary mode of communication in these posters even though the author of the embedded text still has control over it without the possibility of the text being changed by the readers in the act of sharing the posters. The structure of the text in these posters, however, is limited compared to the physical posters. The number of words in these digital posters is limited, and that can be attributed to the limited attention span online (Liu 2005) besides the restricted space within the frame of an image. To appeal to young supporters and create new supporters, these digital posters need to overcome the problem of attention deficit among users with little role for text as a mode of communication and emphasis on standard party symbols for ready identification and visually dramatic scenes. But in doing so, these posters give up on the abilities of textual language through “emphasis, rhymes, and other creative uses . . . to linguistically communicate relations that transcend the grammatical order” (Geise and Baden 2015, 62). The power of the text to create evocative narratives that can add to the visual symbols of protest is, therefore, absent here.

The posters that use text along with visuals are evidently using text as part of their multimodal communication. These posters use text as slogans, but unlike paper posters, these do not have the space to afford large amount of text to support and explain Left party’s position or election agenda within the physical frame of the poster. This lack is compensated through the artistic possibilities that the medium provides—the ability to supplement the text with graphic art through use of more than three colors as traditionally used in official wall-lettering or paper posters.

WhatsApp allows secondary text to accompany images, videos, and other media files through captions, but the design of the platform restricted the forwarding of these captions along with the primary media message to other users by using the “forward” button as of the time of creation of these posters. As such, the explanatory role of the text is absent from media files unless each individual user can send the accompanying caption with the image using the “share” option. The posters overcame this possibility of absent text in forwarded messages and thereby losing context, by doing away with captions and embedding text in the image or by not using text at all. That, however, also restricted the usage of text and its capability to contextualize the images. Political posters have traditionally relied on communication through both visual and textual means and this multimodal communication strategy throws open a “wide a window on the social movements that generated them” (Tschabrun 2003, 306). Thus, while the WhatsApp platform supports sharing and forwarding of images with embedded text, it also encourages a non-use of text by designing a risk factor that promotes such non-usage. Embedding text within the images also meant negotiating the factor of limited space.

The literacy rate in West Bengal is higher than the national average (Khurana 2020), and it can be assumed that most of those who receive these WhatsApp posters can read and understand the sparse and basic text in the colloquial language of Bengali that are used in these posters. This language use contrasts with the more formal version traditionally used in official paper posters or wall-lettering that require higher language-processing abilities and literacy, and therefore, risks alienating those whose native language is not Bengali. The native language of the majority population in West Bengal is Bengali but it coexists with other widely spoken languages in the state such as Santali and Nepali. In terms of language use, therefore, these digital posters by not using text are much more accessible than the official posters. There does remain the possibility that these digital posters with embedded text reach the non-native Bengali speakers, and the text fails to affect them.

Mode of Dissemination

The mode of dissemination of traditional paper posters on walls or billboards ensure that these are potentially visible to everyone. These also assume the reader of these posters to be an active participant in the decoding of the signs in the posters, according to Roland Barthes’ “The Rhetoric of the Image.” The active participant interprets the signs through a shared understanding of the connotations and along with the combination of other signs (Tyler 1992). There is, however, no mechanism for immediate dynamic feedback from the readers of the posters in such a mode of dissemination. Unlike paper posters, the digital posters do not have to be printed and pasted at several locations, saving not only money and time but labor as well. The artists themselves or the administrators of private groups on WhatsApp can share these posters within their private groups or phone contacts. Design of WhatsApp platform, as an instant messaging platform, provides its users the advantages of immediacy and a sense of community (Church and de Oliveira 2013). The instant feedback mechanism of WhatsApp make it a rich medium to organize political support (Pang et al. 2018). Supporters of political parties can disseminate political posters to groups of users using the same platform more easily than traditional media of physical or paper posters or print media, thereby reaching out to their specific audience that is situated in its community in real time and more directly than ever before. The platform design of WhatsApp ensures that messages are received immediately, and the sender of the messages gets an immediate feedback on whether the messages were received. Feedback on WhatsApp includes not only commentary but also emoticons and images, and studies show that such corrective feedback is engaging for the users (Soria et al. 2020). Feedback on WhatsApp can also include viewing the message. As such, the design of the platform makes sure these posters shared among private groups can expect immediate feedback from its community and from unintended recipients in case of messages spilled outside the intended groups. The mode of dissemination, therefore, makes the possibility to critique these posters as well as receive these critiques more easily and quickly than the paper posters. These posters can be distributed without much time lag between dissemination and reception, with potential assurance that these posters have an audience with an ability to react immediately. The technological platform, therefore, generates a media ecosystem that is rich in social presence and processes.

The platform also creates the possibility for amateur artists and supporters who are typically not recruited by the party to voice their support. Any artist, including self-taught and amateur artists, can come forward to lend their voice or rather their paintbrushes to the support of the Leftist cause, upload content and disseminate them. As they weigh in with their individual perspectives on the party and how support for the party should look artistically on posters through WhatsApp’s private groups, they have the potential to create new meaning for party visualization and extend Leftist visuals. WhatsApp’s unique affordances then create new possibilities for these artists (Barton and Lee 2013).

On WhatsApp, messages also have the freedom from the vagaries of recipients’ willingness to “Like” as on Facebook or Instagram, or retweet, to scale up the distribution. As BJP’s WhatsApp election strategy show, if several thousand WhatsApp private groups can be formed, messages can be forwarded and distributed exponentially and micro-targeted as per the user group. In 2019, WhatsApp limited the number of times a message can be forwarded in a day to five (Kastrenakes 2019).

These liberating aspects of WhatsApp’s platform design, however, co-exist with its constraints. Here, too, network effects are visible.¹ One needs to belong to a WhatsApp group or have specific users who can in turn forward the messages, to distribute messages to several people. This is particularly problematic for political messages, such as those carried by these posters that want to spread the word about Left resistance against the governing political parties, gather support, and seek votes. A lack of a large and an organized support base on the ground potentially restricts the distribution and therefore, their audience, unlike paper posters pasted on walls or wall lettering that are visible to everyone, even non-supporters. Moreover, individual artists need to belong to specific groups to ensure their messages are disseminated. While private groups on WhatsApp give a sense of community where these artists can expect to use a visual grammar that is readily identifiable and is encouraged by the rich social presence and social processes of WhatsApp, these groups are also exclusionary. Artists who do not belong to these groups can expect limited audience. These choke points are built into the platform design that affects the network. Supporters of other smaller parties can face the same network effect as these Leftist supporters and activists. The conclusions from this case study are then applicable to communication of political narratives surrounding other parties, too, but this case study is unique given the historic role of art in Leftist political communication, and is different from the usage of the platform by smaller parties in content.

Private groups on WhatsApp tend to have like-minded people as members, and therefore tend to create echo chambers (Khosravinik 2017). In this case, the members of the WhatsApp groups where these were shared were Leftist supporters. The messages then ran the risk of not traveling beyond the existing supporter base, to new potential supporters to increase the Leftist supporter base. The Left parties in India still do not have any dedicated IT cell that can strategize their online presence or aid their workers or supporters (Sarkar 2020).

While there is little data on the relationship between literacy rates and smart phone penetration in India, a 2018 study shows that states with higher literacy had higher smart phone penetration (Dutta 2018). West Bengal, which had a higher than national average literacy rate, however, had lower than national average smart phone penetration in 2017 (Dutta 2018). This then brings us to the question of economics of affordability of smart phones and spread of political messages. West Bengal had a lower than national average per capita income in 2017 to 18 (Bose 2019b), and smartphone penetration is lower than rest of the country (Dutta 2018). While one cannot directly correlate these two data sets, one can interpret that people to whom these digital Leftist posters are reaching are those who can afford the relatively expensive smartphones in the first place. WhatsApp’s design, which is supported on only smartphones and that too on certain recent versions (“WhatsApp FAQ – Supported Devices,” n.d.), therefore, controls the dissemination of political messages by restricting accessibility.

Conclusion

For the artists informally organized under the umbrella of #Vote4Left, WhatsApp’s platform design and affordances that control the crafting and dissemination of political posters opened the possibility of addressing its generic users but also opened the possibility of vague political messaging and limited spread of these posters thereby restricting the ability to gather support for the political cause. Digital political posters shared on WhatsApp therefore illustrate the contradictions and tension that are inherent in the media ecosystem generated by WhatsApp’s platform design and its affordances. With its functionality and network structure, WhatsApp becomes an enabler by affording an ease in appealing and disseminating political posters from supporters of Leftist political parties. Such dissemination of political posters enables artistic contributions from amateur and other artists who will not be visible otherwise to reach large groups of people and share their party visualization. Simultaneously, it underscores pre-existing norms and institutions such as standard party symbols and reliance on groups of supporters to craft and disseminate the digital posters and organize politically. The platform also controlled the dissemination of the message by restricting accessibility based on smartphone affordability. These then potentially leave out people who might not have smartphones whether by choice or by being economically and technologically disadvantaged and disenfranchised, and therefore could form a core support base for the Leftist cause.

This paper is by no means a full realization of the scope of analysis of artistic digital political posters shared on WhatsApp. A more comprehensive analysis could include comparative analysis of political posters of different political parties shared on social media, interviews of the artists, and the public opinion surrounding these shared political posters.

Footnotes

Appendix

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Sananda Sahoo

Notes

Author Biography

Sananda Sahoo is a PhD student in Media Studies at Western University, Canada. Her research interests cover a broad range of topics in the domain of cultural studies and political economy of media, including print and social media, relationship between media and technology, South Asian studies, and the question of identity. She is particularly interested in how micro-level incidents relate to macro-level questions of belonging and rights.

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