Group Chats: So Close yet so Far

In a hilarious turn of events, I turn thirty this year. Despite the jokes, and the gloom and doom that usually surrounds this landmark age in popular culture, I’m actually not feeling the crushing weight of it at all. Perhaps this is due to my youthful lifestyle and lack of hangovers. Perhaps it’s because the typical signifiers of entrance to adulthood have slowly but surely been pushed further and further out of my reach by stagnating wages and a rapidly deteriorating housing market. Perhaps it’s because I’m not bald yet. Who knows.

What I do know is that, as well as my own significant milestone, there’s another birthday this year that is worth noting: on October 31st, my oldest active group chat turns fifteen years old, meaning that it will finally be the same age as we were when we made it all those years ago. The group contains twelve of us, all boys, and we’ve known each other for at least eighteen years at this point. Every day there’s at least a couple hundred messages, mostly pertaining to things like how shit Spurs are right now, or how much of a prick Mikel Arteta is, or how lovely and beautiful Cole Palmer is. Standard stuff. No weird stuff. When we were in school, the chat would be used for coordinating lengthy gaming sessions, entertaining ourselves with prank calls to American florists, and organising evenings spent playing knockout on local football pitches. When we started drinking, the chat was used for planning nights out, laughing at our youngest friend’s attempts at getting into Rock City(“Matt, would u say the bouncers are stood under strong lighting?”), and gossiping about the events of said nights out. These days the nights out are less common, with half of the group having successfully convinced women to have children with them, and we barely play videogames together at all, but the chat is still more or less as active as it ever was, with the main difference being a reduction in the number of white-hot arguments about politics or hairlines. But there’s one other thing that’s changed too, and that’s the involvement of our friend, Jack.

The last time I saw Jack, it was the final day of secondary school. We were sixteen, and everyone was going round signing each other’s yearbooks, with the resulting comments ending up as a confusing mix of motivational quote nonsense and pictures of cocks scribbled next to affectionate insults. One of the cocks that I received in my yearbook was from Jack, and had we known at the time that his rather rushed illustration of a short, fat penis would be the final interaction we would ever have in person, I’m sure we would have gone ahead with it just the same. After school, I went to college, and then worked, and then went to university in a different city. Throughout this time, our entire chat, including Jack, would often play games together, and I never really thought twice about the fact that it was an entirely online friendship between he and I at that point. It was just what we did, and it wasn’t dramatic enough for anyone to comment on it – he did his thing, and we did our thing. Fast forward to today, and Jack hasn’t sent a message in the chat for over two years.

Jack had been very sparse with his contributions for quite some time, and the last time anyone had seen him in person was nine years ago, but as of right now there is absolute radio silence. But the funny thing is, every day, through the bullshit and the football chat and the photos of new sons and new daughters and the thousands upon thousands of messages, he's still there. Jack sees it all, and he reads it all, and in many cases, he reads it faster than anyone else, but he never replies. In fact, I’m going to open the chat right now and ask him to say something, and we’ll see how long it takes him to read it and not respond.

Less than a minute. So, he’s right there. The chat isn’t muted, the notifications are on - he just doesn’t want to engage. What are we supposed to make of this? How do you get your head around the idea that there’s this man, a man who you mainly knew as a child, who, as far as you’re aware, still exists in the same city as you, and who knows every intimate detail of everything that is happening in your life, but who is also essentially a stranger to you? How do you reconcile that reality? We’ve come up with half-arsed theories of course, like maybe someone has stolen his phone and kept the same number and is keeping up to date with all of his chats for some sick reason known only to themselves. Or maybe he’s paralysed in hospital, controlling the phone with his eyes, too merciful to tell us the bad news. Or maybe he just thinks we’re all really fucking annoying and he’s laughing about us in a different, cooler, group chat. I have no idea. But it drives me insane to think about it. Jack, if you’re reading this, please reply, we could play Gears of War 2 like we used to. Remember the chainsaws, Jack. Remember Jamal complaining endlessly. We could go back…

The thing is, we’re the first generation that will live and die in group chats. Barring an unpredictably seismic event that tears our friendship apart, there’s absolutely no reason to think that my boys group chat won’t still exist in one form or another in fifty years, when we’re all old and useless. And then, once the responsibilities of adulthood have moved out and grown up to have their own responsibilities, maybe we’ll go back to gaming, and prank calls, and three nights out at Rock City a week. But then inevitably, one of us will die. And what happens then? What happens when sixty-five years of daily conversation suddenly stalls? Does everyone take a respectful two week break from sending links to football transfer news? Do you continue to refer to them by the insulting nicknames they secured fifty years previously? Do you…remove them from the group?

There are people out there already grappling with these questions, obviously. Group chats have changed the world in a million ways both small and large, and one of the most bizarre results of their existence is the fact that I now have a friend who is in a Telegram group chat with people who are actively fighting on opposing sides of the Russia-Ukraine war. Just imagine that. Trench warfare in below-freezing temperatures, fighting and dying over indistinguishable grey fields, watching your best friend in the entire world getting nailed to the floor in a suicide drone attack, settling down afterwards in the crisp evening once everything is said and done, your hands still shaking from the adrenaline of one of the worst days of your life, unable to sleep, unable to relax, then finally opening your phone in search of some minor comfort, and immediately seeing a meme sent to your group from some Russian guy, a meme which depicts you and your comrades as a crying cat. You can’t kick him because you don’t have admin privileges. You can’t kill him because he’s fighting over a different territory to you. You just exist in this virtual space with someone who doesn’t respect you, doesn’t like you, wants you dead, and finds it all very funny. That’s the recipe for an extremely specific and extremely new form of PTSD.

I worry sometimes about the more banal drawbacks of becoming so accustomed to a life where the majority of online communication takes place in living, breathing, 24/7 group chats. For instance, I recently bumped into one of the boys from home in Tesco while we were both on routine shopping trips, and although I’ve known this man for most of my life and love him like a brother, during this brief encounter we both very obviously struggled to find the correct words and phrases to use for that moment. It’s not a case of “How are you?”, because we were messaging in the chat less than ten minutes earlier and had been, on and off, for the past several hours. We knew how we were. I suppose we could have tried to quickly comment on or carry on the football conversation from the chat, as if it was actually in person, but that feels strange and abrupt, and a bit too forced. So, we awkwardly said hello, made a joke about it, then moved on with our days, mocking each other over text minutes later. This friction between text conversations and in-person conversations is something I’ve felt quite a bit over the years. I love hanging out with my friends and I would always prefer that over a text conversation, but there’s a problem to be solved when you meet up with a group where everyone already knows everyone’s business, and there’s never any news held back for when you’re looking each other in the eye. This can often cause the first thirty minutes or so to be quite awkward and fumbling, with everyone trying to slip into a gear that they haven’t been in with each other since the previous hangout. And it definitely is a different gear. Someone’s persona through text and their persona in-person can obviously be quite similar, but the two mediums of communication are undoubtedly very different, and naturally this often leads to different approaches, and speech patterns, and levels of engagement, regardless of who the communication is with. So, quieter friends might become chattier and more personable over text, and blunt texters can switch to being charismatic and conversational in person.

There’s a lot of confidence to be gained from the shielding and distance that a group chat provides compared to in-person interaction, but there can also be a lot of confidence to lose. Everyone has experienced the sinking feeling of sending a message that encourages a reply from the group, and watching as everyone else reads it, sometimes ten or more people, then waiting as the minutes tick by without a response. I’m fortunate in that things like this don’t really bother me anymore, and I’m often happy to double or triple message, casting and recasting my fishing line out into the murky waters of the group chat with seemingly no regard for catching anything at all, but for some people this apparent rejection by so many of their friends can be absolutely gutting. The most unfortunate part of this phenomenon is that the reason for the ‘ignoring’ of the message is often completely innocent, but the reality of that circumstance is absolutely impenetrable to the initial messenger, as they’re unable to see that you’re caught up with work, or getting onto a bus, or have left your phone open while taking a shit. The distance that a group chat provides you from your friends only really takes on a malicious face when the topic being discussed is something more serious or troubling, such as when a group is confronted with the reality of making a decision regarding an uncomfortable topic. In this scenario, especially with the ability to screen your phone’s notifications without opening them, it’s very easy for each individual member of the group to justify to themselves that they don’t need to reply, that someone else will reply, and that there is no consequence for not replying. It only takes imagining the employment of this tactic in an in-person conversation for the foundations of those arguments to crumble, and for you to realise that yes, though it might be anxiety enducing, you probably should reply to your friends.

Look, we might not having flying cars, or a restaurant on the moon, or a functioning democracy, but in recent years it’s become more and more obvious that we are very much sliding into what one could reasonably describe as ‘the future’. It might not entirely be here yet, but the robots, and the AI, and the combined Robot AI Killing Machines, are coming, no matter how much I kick and scream and vomit. For now, before the water wars begin, and before my house is automatically targeted by a drone-strike for tweeting that Elon needs to wear looser clothing, we should probably stop and try to take a second to appreciate all the current technologies that our ancestors would have considered futuristic when they were around. That’s right, I’m talking tissues, I’m talking toilets that flush away your disgusting filthy shameful mess, I’m talking Dexter the TV show, I’m talking Pink Pony Club, I’m talking the hole on the front of your boxers, and yes, for all its flaws and downfalls, I’m talking group chats.

I can and will sit here all day analysing the potential negative side effects of us becoming reliant on the group chat as one of our fundamental tools for communication, but when you take a step back and really admire the view of what is possible with the technology, it’s hard to come away unimpressed. I can go almost anywhere in the world, in any time-zone, in any weather, in almost any physical condition, all the while knowing that if I get even the tiniest bit bored for even the briefest of moments, I can throw a “what’s for dinner gang?” in the group chat, sparking a dozen photos of meals that I would never eat. Thanks to group chats, I will never have to suffer the absolute chaos that organising a night out in the seventies must have been. Thanks to group chats, we know exactly how much our elected representatives despise us and each other. Thanks to group chats, I never have to speak to one of my Lesser Friends one on one ever again.

To finish off, I’ll leave you with three predictions for the future:

1. In the next ten years, there will be a subscription service you can pay for where you get to join the group chats of celebrities – think football teams, and film casts during promotional periods – as a spectator only. They’ll market it as a glimpse into the lives of those better than us, then there will be a big scandal and it will either shut down completely or, more likely, become so sanitised so as to defeat the original point of the idea.

2. The introduction of AI celebrities who you can add to your group chat, and who respond and talk with the personality of someone who has probably been dead for thirty years. Think AI Michael Jackson messaging the chat unprompted at 3am like “anyone up? shamon etc”

3. As mentioned previously, eventually it will become extremely common for members of your group chats to die. To combat any potential sadness and therefore lack of screentime that this might cause, WhatsApp and Facebook will scrape the archived messages of you and your friends, building an artificial copy of each of you. Within twenty-four hours of receiving the death certificate, NewYou will be ready to launch inside the group, cracking those same old jokes you always made, reminiscing over those same old glory days you always talked about, spouting those same shitty opinions about football that you always had.
This way, it will never go quiet in the chat. You will always reply. Jack will always reply.

And if someone’s still replying, are they really even gone?