You must log in or register to comment.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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.
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.
Types of communication that were once limited by the human capacity for having actual conversations now flow at unprecedented speed, in many directions at once; we are strangely perma-linked to specific subsets of our friends and family, ceaselessly co-processing everything that happens.
“The Last Place Left Online for Real Conversation,” read the headline of a Times opinion article from 2022, which emphasized the appealing privacy, intimacy and sociality of the group chat in a world where many had decided Twitter was a hellscape and Instagram was an endless reel of ads for candle subscriptions or start-ups claiming to have redesigned the bra.
Looking back at our texts — sent at a high clip during a strange, slightly manic spring and summer — I see us doing other things: providing one another with a kind of idle and sometimes distracting presence that in some ways amounted to very little, a form of constant low-grade company that was both intermittent and dependable.
It was what I could tolerate: giving one another “Top Gun” nicknames, trading gossip and bad-music recommendations, arranging a mutual listening session on Spotify while getting ready for a party — the virtual version of someone’s simply sitting next to you in the midst of illness or grief, doing nothing much more than being there.
The original article contains 3,085 words, the summary contains 313 words. Saved 90%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This is fascinating to read as someone who has never been “in a group chat” in the way this writer uses them. I’ve been in groups for scheduling activities before, or in work groups, but they were always used pretty strictly for scheduling or conveying activity- or work-related info. None of the people I chat with recreationally know each other.
Never had more than 1 friend who has similar interests?
Had a bunch of friends in college but we all lived in the same hallway, so when we wanted to talk as a group we just… talked in a group. Other than that we somehow got along texting individually. That was before everyone had switched to smartphones, anyway; I started college in '07, before the iPhone.
Then I moved a few times over the last decade+, and the people I’m still talking to are separated by thousands of miles of space and years of my life in terms of when I knew them in person.
And like I said, when I’ve been in groups organized around an activity like D&D, we’ve had chats for scheduling, but they pretty much stayed on topic and didn’t become, like, friend-group-chats.
