If there is one thing the population of America can agree on, it is the fact that group chats rule this earth.
As for me, I am constantly texting all the time and at the very least receiving texts all the time. While some people may perceive coming back to their phone with 258 awaiting text messages as a nightmare, I am not one of them.
As someone who is constantly using media for school, takes a graphic design class, and goes on endless doom scrolls, it’s safe to say yes I’m texting and my attention span has for sure, if not yet, been shattered by the constancy of digital communication.
One might ask: well, what do you even talk about anyway? Easy, a main factor in my group chat specifically is a rundown of our nights out, even if we talk about it on our group chat we’ll discuss it in person.
Something that makes group chats specifically even significant in our lives is the amount of niche jokes that end up channeling back when you’re face to face. Some of the funniest interactions with my friends have been in our group chat.
While there are many things that people talk about, this is the particular stuff that I talk about. Its the gadget in my life that makes the texture of my experience that is drawn by the fact that I am talking to my friends all at once, almost all the time.
That is of course if I decide I want to respond then in that case, they’re talking just without me anyways.
What’s crazy is this type of communication has been technologically possible for decades yet we’ve seen it in different formats. Things like FaceTime with multiple people, or even actual phone calls with different people at once is considered a group chat besides texting.
Smartphones essentially smashed that distinction when Apple made it possible in 2008, eliminating the limited SMS Messaging, with being able to text multiple people at once with their iMessage.
After that, cell carriers and other competitors followed making this decade breaking invention go from a convenient tool to something your mom might use when announcing news to a large group.
For me, I have many group chats that serve a multitude of purposes, ranging from one called “FamBam” with just my family, to a staple I’m constantly on-I won’t name for the sake that it’s way too long- which is comprised of my best friends
But I also have some that hold barely any importance to me, like when my friend had created a group chat with people I didn’t even know to plan out her birthday.
While every group chat may not hold this significance, there is always a purpose and one notable factor being their consistency. The fact that this type of communication was once limited to having a face to face conversation can now continue at constant speed even in many directions at a time.
It is kind of funny how the world for most teenagers went from communicating to your friends via notes you would pass through class, to texting each other because you’re not all together at the same time anymore.
Let’s face it, there have been so many social media users, journalists, and academics that have spent their time looking into how energy parsing on platforms like Twitter, now X, Facebook, and TikTok have had on public speech, and those effects have been pretty bad.
But group chats specifically have been seen as one of the more impactful ways that pushes away digital speech and have become a more anti-social-media phenomenon based upon the fact you’re using your phone to get the benefits of actual human interaction.
If you really think about it, during the 2020 pandemic, group chats were like a lifeline to human connectedness and statistically had unprecedented creation of group chats from 2020 to 2021.
Either way, while the “group” in group chat might be important, it’s still just chatting, an omnipresent burble of digital speech. Having a group is different from just having a “regular conversation”. It’s looser, more nebulous, and intimate, so much so that every language among every group chat is something completely different.
All the inside jokes, memes, shared pictures, and almost mundane topics are all composed in this private document that we are all contributing towards together all the time.