The interactive making of collective memories in WhatsApp group messages: The case of a small community with strong ties during the COVID-19 Lockdown

Collective remembering in conversations creates a feeling of connection, strengthens social bonds, fosters entrainment, and consolidates community identity. COVID-19 lockdown policies and social distancing measures have significantly affected social interactions, including conversations in which collective remembering occurs. We tested whether lockdown policies were associated with an increase in collective remembering in WhatsApp group messages (N= 32,810) collected over a period of 700 consecutive days, before, during and after imposed lockdown. Messages were produced by members of a small community with strong ties living in one of the most populated metropolitan areas in Latin America. We found higher number of WhatsApp group messages where participants collaborated in the retrieval of memories of past, shared experiences during the lockdown period, in comparison to pre-lockdown and post-lockdown periods. We also found that the use of verbs in the past tense predicted collective remembering in WhatsApp group messages. Our analysis also includes an example of those instances to show the interactional dynamics that forged the formation of collective memories in the small community (Supplementary information 1). The increase of collective remembering in WhatsApp group messages may represent an adaptive collective behavior in response to changes in global social norms.