People have been talking over one another online in every conceivable form since the beginnings of the internet. Digital bulletin-board systems—proto–group chats, you could say—date back to the 1970s, and SMS-style group chats popped up in WhatsApp and iMessage in 2011. Most social networks now allow users to create multi-person direct messages. But at some point in the late 2010s, as many of us grew exhausted with the process of broadcasting every stray thought to huge, algorithmically sorted audiences, group chats began to take on a new relevance.This rings true. I have quite a few friends who have, for one reason or another, burned out on conventional social media. How do we stay in touch? Via various forms of group chats, of course.
As New York magazine put it in 2019, group chats became “an outright replacement for the defining mode of social organization of the past decade: the platform-centric, feed-based social network.” If virality and ad-based platforms felt extractive, the group chat was its opposite: restorative, even sacred. It’s a form of communication that often feels like a lifeline to people, and unlike the Facebook feed or Twitter, where posts can be linked to wherever, group chats are a closed system—a safe and (ideally) private space. What happens in the group chat ought to stay there.
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