Digital Respectability Politics: How 'Proper' Online Behavior Erases Cultural Identity

That workshop teaching your grandmother the "right way" to use WhatsApp isn't education, it's erasure. The most radical act might be letting her send those 15-minute voice notes after all.

You've seen it happen. Maybe you've even caught yourself doing it:

"No, Mom, that's not how you're supposed to use Instagram."
"Dad, voice notes should be short. Just type it out."
"Auntie, you don't need to ask about someone's family before every work message."

Let's call this what it is: digital respectability politics. It's colonization dressed up as helpfulness, and we need to talk about it.

---

When "Helping" Becomes Erasing

My father recently called me, frustrated after attending a "digital literacy" workshop where the instructor spent 30 minutes teaching elders to restrict their voice notes to under one minute, replace voice with text whenever possible, and avoid "cluttering" group chats with greetings.

"They're teaching us to communicate like robots," he said.

He was right. These elders weren’t gaining digital literacy, they were being stripped of cultural communication practices refined over centuries. The rich contextual information, relationship maintenance, and communal knowledge-building central to their communication was being sacrificed at the altar of Western "efficiency."

The instructor beamed with pride when one elder sent a clipped, context-free text message instead of her usual voice greeting. What was celebrated as "progress" was actually something much darker: the successful erasure of cultural communication patterns.

And we're all complicit in this.

---

The Digital Trap

Have you ever:

• Cringed at a family member's "unprofessional" email?
• Edited a colleague's LinkedIn profile to make it more "proper"?
• Suggested someone make their communication more "efficient"?

Congratulations. You've become an enforcer of digital respectability politics.

I’ve done it too. I once told my uncle his professional emails were "too personal" before realizing I was asking him to erase his cultural identity to appease Western corporate standards.

---

Digital respectability politics follows the same playbook as its offline counterpart: it promises that if you just behave according to the dominant culture’s standards, you’ll be accepted and successful.

But here’s the trap: the standards are both arbitrary and moving targets. They’re designed not to include but to erase difference, stripping away the very cultural richness that sustains us.