WhatsApp: An assemblage, a mnemonic community, and a site of counter-memory

This article examines how WhatsApp functions as a space where people shape collective memory and challenge dominant sociopolitical narratives. Focusing on Nigeria’s Obidient movement, a youth-led campaign that supported Peter Obi in the 2023 presidential election, this article seeks to understand how everyday online interactions on WhatsApp produced alternative ways of remembering and forgetting. In other words, this articles asks, How did members of an unofficial Obidient WhatsApp group enact counter-memory practices regarding Nigeria’s 2023 general elections? To answer this question, this study deployed the ethnographic approach and drew from Foucault’s concept of counter-memory and assemblage theory to understand how memory, technology, and social interaction converged in dynamic ways. The results indicate that members of the WhatsApp group construct and circulate alternative narratives that challenge mainstream sociopolitical accounts. These results are discussed in two central themes: ‘Counter-memory and the construction of alternative narrative’ and ‘WhatsApp as a mnemonic community and assemblage’. Through practices of circulating first-hand experiences and lived testimonies, evidence of electoral misconducts, and memories of past elections and protests, members collectively produced what the author described as a ‘mnemonic community’, a space where memory is created, negotiated, and sustained through interaction. However, these practices are not independent but are shaped by the interconnectedness of human (members of the group) and non-human (WhatsApp, smartphones, or multimedia content) factors. Overall, this article argues that messaging apps, such as WhatsApp, significantly shape how people remember and interpret sociopolitical movements and participation.