Here’s just a sample of group chats that have been messaging me recently: college friends, housemates, camp friends, friends I met in adulthood, high-school friends, a subset of high-school friends who live in New York City, a subset of high-school friends who are single, a group of friends going to a birthday party, a smaller group of friends planning a gift for that person’s birthday, co-workers, book club, another book club, family, extended family, a Wordle chat with friends, a Wordle chat with family.
I love a group text—a grext, if you’ll permit me—but lately, the sheer number of them competing for my attention has felt out of control. By the time I wake up, the notifications have already started rolling in; as I’m going to bed, they’re still coming. In between, I try to keep up, but all it takes is one 30-minute meeting before I’ve somehow gotten 100 new messages, half of them consisting of “lol” or “right!” I scroll up and up and up, trying to find where I left off, like I’ve lost my place in a book that keeps getting longer as I read.
For better or for worse, we might be in the Age of the Group Chat. WhatsApp, the most popular messaging service worldwide, gained more than two and a half billion active users from 2012 to 2023, and is projected to grow 18 percent more by 2025; one study found that less than 2 percent of participants had only one-on-one chats on the app, and concluded that “the group chat feature is used frequently by nearly every WhatsApp user.” Of course, you can also group-chat with SMS, iMessage, GroupMe, Messenger, WeChat—or some combination of these and other platforms. In a recent survey of roughly 1,000 Americans, 66 percent said they’ve felt overwhelmed by their group messages, and 42 percent said that group chats can feel like a part-time job.
Just a few years ago, we might have done more of that chattering online. But with X (formerly known as Twitter) in a state of disarray, Facebook falling out of favor, and Instagram taken over by ads, social media is feeling less and less social. Jeffrey A. Hall, a communication professor at the University of Kansas who studies technology and relationships, calls this the “twilight of the social-media era,” in which “the distance between using it for talking to your friends and what we have now” is bigger than it’s ever been. He believes that although those sites aren’t fostering real connection—advice, inside jokes, updates, memes—nearly as much anymore, people might be reclaiming it with group chats.
That connection is a wonderful thing. Talking in a grext around the clock can feel like you and your fellow group members are facing the world together—and reaching out to everyone individually about all the stupid little details of your day would simply be impossible. But being kept constantly in the loop can feel unsustainable. I’m starting to learn that once you begin moving through life as but one humble node in a dense network of messagers, it’s hard to get untangled. To borrow from Dungeons & Dragons, the Age of the Group Chat seemed like it would be Chaotic Good—but it’s verging on Chaotic Evil.
Group texts are hardly the only demand on our time and attention these days. And yet, the researchers I spoke with agreed that they can be uniquely unwieldy. They both contribute to and reflect the complexity of our social worlds, Kate Mannell, a digital-media researcher at Deakin University, in Australia, told me. Creating a grext is so easy that you can end up with a separate chat for nearly every iteration of any group, each with its own particular dynamic. You might start with one chat, and then create another without one member who moved away, and then another to bring in a friend of a friend. (When I want to text my high-school friends in New York, I actually have to stop and think: Should I use “Big Juicy Apple” or “The Actual Big Apple”?) Compared with a one-on-one thread, in which the other party will typically pause until you respond, group chats aren’t so easy to manage. Messages can flow in all day, whether you’re free to reply or not—and if you aren’t on your phone when a particular conversation is going down, you might miss it entirely.
Those features aren’t all bad. Grexts are good at mimicking the casual back-and-forth of in-person dialogue, and the result can be more dynamic and fun than a two-person thread. Having a chat going also means you have a space to share mundane little updates throughout the day. Studies have found that group chats can contribute to group cohesion and shared fun. A group text can be a refuge, and a reminder that you’re part of something.
Some researchers call this “ambient virtual presence”: Even when you’re alone, you’re not alone. Annette Markham, a digital-culture researcher at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, in Australia, has compared this phenomenon to echolocation, the process that some animals, such as bats and dolphins, use to locate objects: They produce a continuous sound and use the resulting echo to sense what’s around them. Humans might use technologies such as group chats in a similar way—as a call-and-response, taking in information about their social networks and locating themselves within those webs.
But taking in too many signals can be overwhelming. Joseph Bayer, a communication professor at Ohio State University who studies mobile technologies, told me that group chats can create a “waterfall type of effect,” where messages keep flooding in and adding up. Eventually, you’re underwater. Adding to the chaos, Katharina Knop-Hülß, a mobile-media researcher at Hanover University, in Germany, told me, different chat members all bring their own personalities, communication styles, and expectations for group norms. (“There’s a lot going on.”) Mannell noted that those norms haven’t been settled, in part because group-chatting—and texting in general—is relatively new, and its features are constantly changing. (Updates to iMessage, for instance, have granted the ability to reply in a thread to specific texts, to tag people into a message, and to “react” with a symbol such as a heart or thumbs-up.) She’s found that without a standard etiquette, people have very different ideas about what degree of responsiveness is required—which can cause real tension.
Fear of that tension can make muting or even leaving a chat feel daunting. And anyway, you might not want to miss out, even if you are overwhelmed; the desire isn’t to exit the room so much as to crack a window. I left my friends’ Wordle chat once because I’d stopped playing, but I had to rejoin when I learned that someone had used it to share a life update; never again would I be left in the dark. Now I usually just lurk silently in the chat, occasionally reacting with an exclamation point to a good score. If group messaging is like echolocation, then disconnecting can be disorienting—like losing the “I am here” dot on a giant existential map.
Grext anxiety is hard to resolve because it isn’t really just about the group-chat form or even mobile technology in general; it’s about the eternal tension between individual and collective identity, between being our own person and being accountable to others. Ultimately, most of us do want connection, even if it involves some obligations; we’ll take an avalanche of messages when we’re busy if it means we can reach out when we’re hurting.
Still, we’d do well to notice when our chats are giving us more dread than joy, or when they’ve multiplied to the point that we don’t even associate them with intimacy and connection anymore. If we’re turning to group messaging as social media starts to feel less social, we should be holding on to the group chats that really help us talk to people, and perhaps relinquishing the ones that feel as simultaneously crowded and empty as my social-media feeds do now. Hall told me that of all the different ways you can use social media, the evidence suggests that actively talking to people you care about—about subjects you care about—is what’s…[hidden]
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