Seymour says that WhatsApp is as addictive as other social media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter. When she reflects on this experience, what she sees is “a sense of entitlement … people have different interpretations of what it means to communicate, and their expectations of communication from a WhatsApp group.” I hadn’t spoken to them properly in weeks.” Amal declined, and left the WhatsApp group shortly afterwards. But then “they came into my workplace,” she says, and asked her if she wanted to come out for a drink. At first, Amal found the changes funny, if odd. They kept changing the name of the group chat to “Hello Amal” or “We Miss You Amal” in an attempt to get her attention. These friends, says Amal, became fixated with her. “But there were two people in the group who just couldn’t come to grips with it … It was a big thing for them.” “Everyone got back to being busy,” Amal says. After things returned to normal, she says, the group chat fizzled out. During the first lockdown, Amal, 21, a retail assistant from Birmingham, formed a 12-person WhatsApp group with friends from college. Once the pandemic died down, however, the chats took on a different role. “We couldn’t get out of the house, but we could have communities inside our phones.” “Covid made WhatsApp far more important,” says Dr Tali Gazit, a lecturer in information science at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. There is something to be said for the idea that not everything needs to be responded to, or deserves a response.”įor many, WhatsApp group chats began infiltrating their time like Japanese knotweed during the Covid-19 pandemic. Think about what you can be doing in that time. “The basic thing it does is colonise and eat away at bits of your attention here and there, until gradually it starts to occupy a bigger and bigger part of it. “Take an executive overview of how WhatsApp is eating into your life,” says Richard Seymour, author of The Twittering Machine. These chats reduce us all to an army of modern-day Mrs Bennets, endlessly gossiping or swapping mundane observations, rather than working, thinking, or simply existing. Because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and even rarer, thing that might be worth saying.”Īlthough Deleuze died before social media took off, the phenomenon he observed – how pointless chatter takes us away from the conversations that really matter – could easily be applied to any fast-flashing WhatsApp group. Deleuze writes: “Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves, but rather force them to express themselves what a relief to have nothing to say. In this, he is exercising what the philosopher Gilles Deleuze describes as “the right to say nothing”. “I just can’t live a life these days where I come back to my phone and have several dozen messages to sift through,” he explains. In effect, Groner has asserted his desire to live without being assailed by incessant messages that require immediate responses. “She is willing to sacrifice herself to be a part of it,” he says, “because it doesn’t bother her in the way it does me.” Although Groner is often told that he is rude, he is also an unlikely hero for the WhatsApp group resistance: “I have so many people telling me that they wish they could get out of groups, but they’re afraid they’ll offend people if they leave.” Instead, Groner has hit on a workable compromise, at least for him: his wife monitors the group on his behalf. “But I need to uphold these boundaries for myself, so I don’t get sucked in.” “I’m sure people in the group think it’s aggressive, or strange at the very least,” he says. Each time, a cousin has added him back in, usually to wish him a happy birthday or happy anniversary, and Groner has gone straight back out again, without thanking them. “But I wasn’t getting any value out of it.” It is a space to keep up with family news: birthdays, anniversaries, births, new jobs.
They are lovely people.” Groner is referring to a 25-strong WhatsApp group consisting of his first and second cousins. “I am probably on the wrong side of history on this,” says Danny Groner, 39, a marketing director from New York.
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