Social mania Butterfingers: How group chats rule the world

Iam texting all the time. I am, at the very least, receiving texts all the time, a party to conversations in which I am alternately an eavesdropper and an active participant. This is because I am in a lot of group chats — constant, interlinked, text-message-based conversations among multiple friends that happen all day long. I dip into and out of these conversations, on my phone and on my computer. Sometimes I will put both away for two hours and return to find 279 new messages waiting.

Some people might consider this a nightmare, but I am not one of them. I am a person under the age of 30 with a computer job and a Twitter habit (lately, I guess, an X one) who generally prefers to have plans most nights of the week and whose attention has long been divided, if not at times entirely shattered, by the constancy of digital communication. So I am texting the chat.

You might ask: What are we even talking about? 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. There is a heated back-and-forth concerning some controversy online that we are back-channeling about in private, or else something happening in one of our real lives that needs unpacking and cannot wait until we all meet in person. There might be a rundown of a night out. Serious news, easier to give to two or three friends at once, about the decline of a parent’s health. A meme about a Bill Simmons podcast. What else do people talk about? Many things, I’m sure, but this is the particular stuff I am talking about. The texture of my whole life experience is coloured by the sense that I am talking to all my friends, all at once, almost all the time — or at the very least that I could be talking to them all, always, and that if I am not talking to them, then they are talking anyway, without me.

This kind of communication has been technologically possible for decades now, but for much of my lifetime it had to occur in fixed locations (in front of computers) at fixed times (when you were all online; this was back when the idea of being “online” or “offline” still had meaning). Then smartphones smashed that distinction. In 2008, Apple made it possible to text-message multiple people at the same time, moving limited SMS messaging into their iMessage system — essentially conflating “texting” and “messaging,” collapsing group conversation into a single organized chain. Cell carriers and competitors followed, and slowly, over the next decade, the group chat moved from an occasionally convenient tool — say, something your sister might use to blast big news to a large family group — to a ubiquitous social phenomenon.

My own group chats serve a wide range of purposes, from the purely practical to the highly intimate. There is a taxonomy — not quite a hierarchy, but not not a hierarchy. Some are basically purpose-driven and never meant to last: A new chat might pop up for a wedding weekend, a set of unsaved numbers asking one another questions about the location of a brunch, a fleeting collective of friends-of-friends that loses touch on Sunday night.

Haigney is the web editor at The Paris Review