Eeeek! Group Chat Is Coming For Us!
I dreamed I was captured by a Chat Group and didn’t have a single thing to say.
Group Chat is the new — — well, Thing. If you’re not Group Chatting you are just not a part of contemporary humankind.
I know this partly thanks to a recent article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine by Sophie Haigney, a Group Chat Expert (GCE) who has 16.2k Twitter/X followers and got paid more for this piece than I have thus far ever been paid for a newspaper or magazine article. It should be noted that I am 70 years older than GCE. You can read the entire piece (without my interruptions) here.
But I found myself chatting with the Group Chatter as I read her words (here in quotes; I’m a daily Times print edition subscriber.) A few of her words, not in quotes, I only imagined. Well, anyway —
Me: It looks like you text (primarily Group Text) just about around the clock.
GCE: I am in countless Group Chats — “constant, interlinked text- message-based conversations among multiple friends that happen all day long. I am in and out of these conversations on my phone and my computer. Sometimes I will put both away for two hours and return to find 279 new messages waiting.”
Me: This sounds like a nightmare.
GCE: That’s because you are an Old Person. “I am a person under 30 whose attention has long been divided, if not at times entirely shattered, by the constancy of digital communication. So I am texting the chat.”
Me: Oh, OK. I sort of wonder what you’re talking about.
GCE: “Well. Someone sends a link to an article, or a life update, or a joke, another joke, a dumber joke, a reading recommendation, a funny photo…”
Me: Wait, wait! A reading recommendation? Do group chatters actually quit chatting long enough to read a book?
GCE: (No response.)
GCE: As I was saying. “There is a heated back-and-forth concerning some controversy online that we are back-channeling about in private, or else something happening in our real lives that needs unpacking…”
Me: I don’t think much of my real life often needs unpacking.
GCE: Oh, you Old People. “The texture of my whole life experience is colored by the sense that I am talking to all my friends all at once, almost all the time.”
Me: My friendships might not survive. But that’s beside the point. Can you give me a little history about how we got to today’s new GC reality?
GCE: Sure. “In 2008, Apple made it possible to text-message multiple people at the same time. And slowly, over the next decade the group chat moved from an occasionally convenient tool to a ubiquitous social phenomenon.”
Me: I’m with you on that ubiquity thing. But I understand that, with the group chat you “feel as if we are endlessly whispering in our friends’ ears.” Umm, is this, as you also say, “a deception?”
GCE: “I would say instead that it glows with potential.”
Me: Gosh, I hadn’t thought about it that way. Potentially, the group chat just chats its way into a global phenomenon?
GCE: “The conversation in a good group chat sometimes pauses, but it never really dies. And this constancy has consequences that we might not recognize, that stretch beyond the little enclaves that we have created for ourselves.”
Me: Uhh. Can you elaborate on that a little?
GCE: “That ‘thinking together,’ pinging back and forth in real time, (GCE had pointed to the group-chatting of Fox News hosts that led to Fox having to pay off Dominion Voting Systems for on-air defamation) moving toward something nonspecific but nonetheless quite tangible — that’s the stuff of a group chat.”
Me: I see. And then you talk about your own chats — -
GCE: “… a jumble of links, a hodgepodge of different conversations that start and stop. I imagine people complaining (about various things.) Without realizing it,, they might have built something together, however undefined — a community based in shared values and interests and hobbies, reaffirmed daily by the little stuff… Then someone questions a bank’s solvency, others latch onto it and all hell breaks loose.”
Me: Yeah, I’m seeing a lot of that these days. Hell breaking loose isn’t my idea of fun— but again, I’m an Old Person. Calm and rational still sort of appeal to me.
GCE: “People act irrationally all the time, based on limited information, but there is something specific and maybe unprecedented about this number of influential people working at this speed, their reactions all caroming off one another’s in one digital place, then bouncing back into the real world to send millions of dollars one way or another.”
Me: Don’t you worry about kooks in groups?
GCE: “The ‘group’ in a group chat is important, but it’s the chatting, the omnipresent burble of digital speech, that is the crucial part.”
Me: Okay.
CGE: “This is something else technology has added to our human experience. I cannot claim that it is entirely good…”
Me, rudely interrupting: Yay you.
CGE: “…but I can say that it feels — to me, on balance — additive, constructive rather than isolating. In the landscape of group chats your social world tingles with life, in all directions, at all times, at your literal and proverbial fingertips. ‘Conversation’ expands into something else altogether, something bigger and more chaotic and less clearly defined but which is humming along beside me and with me even as I am supposed to be writing this right now.”
Me: Thanks. I have to go take a Tylenol.