Pop matters: The fine art of naming a group chat

:The first thing RJ McLaughlin did when he was back on campus in late August for his junior year at Ramapo College of New Jersey was make a group chat for himself and the three guys with whom he shares a dormitory apartment. They had to come up with the perfect name. “The main thing is finding something that makes everybody happy and everybody laugh,” he said. “It has to be something that expresses who we are.”

McLaughlin, 20, is part of so many group chats that each one has to have a name. There is a family chat (“Wally World”), multiple friend chats (“‘The’ group chat™” and “The 4.5 horseman of the apocalypse”) and class chats (Clash, short for Clash of Clans, a game played during Critical Reading and Writing). “I would never have a group chat with no name and just numbers,” he said. “How would you differentiate them?” He added, “Leaving it blank would be like not naming a baby.” Over time, he has developed a playbook for coming up with one. “I lead a brainstorming session, where everyone puts ideas into the chat,” he said. “Then we all vote on it.” The exercise is repeated to determine what the group’s picture will be. He estimated that he has come up with two dozen or more group chat names.

McLaughlin knows that in other groups, people will change the name arbitrarily, but that doesn’t fly when he’s in charge. “When you redo a group chat name, it has to be a democratic decision between everybody,” he said. The name has value, he said. “We have to protect it.”

For the dorm room chat, they settled on “Car Jack,” an anagram of their names (Anthony, John, Curtis and RJ). “The picture is also a picture of a car jack,” McLaughlin said. “It’s random and weird and expresses who we are.”

Even as people are very much gathering in real life again, the group chat continues to be a virtual town square where essential — and non-essential — communications occur. And naming them has become something of an art, with different social groups striving for an accurate representation of who they are. While groups of friends may opt for an inside joke that makes them laugh every time they see it, more formal threads can require something straightforward. Some group chats have systems in place for changing names and photos.

Torie Deible, 31, who works in sales for an engineering company, is in a group chat with 15 women who all became friends while living in New York City (Ms. Deible now lives in Denver). Every month they change the photo to whoever’s birthday is that month, and they let her choose the name as well. “It’s fun to get loved like this once a year,” she said.

Ashley Kozich, 30, who works for a community foundation and lives in Fort Lauderdale, has a group chat with her eight best friends she met as a student at the University of Mississippi. In the last year a lot of them have had babies, so they now highlight the most recently born as the group photo.

But the group name is here to stay: “The Sorry People.” “In college we were a really rowdy group of girls, and we would cause chaos and trouble wherever we went,” Ms. Kozich said. “In the mornings we would have to go on these apology tours and say sorry for whatever we did.”