How Group Chats Rule the World

I am 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.

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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 colored 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.