Group chat overload: Have we reached the WhatsApp peak?
Every morning before leaving for work, Rosie, a 28-year-old physiotherapist, chats with her three roommates. Sometimes they sympathize or celebrate the weather or football results; sometimes one of them has good news about a job interview to share or blows steam on their latest dating app disaster.
The friends have moved from the house they shared in Bristol last summer when they left university, and they now live in different towns, but their WhatsApp group, named after the road they lived on together, starts messaging around 7:30 a.m. most days. "I live alone now, and I miss having company," says Rosie. “Some of the others have moved back to their parents, which has its own challenges. We make each other laugh and we stay sane. We don't meet much, but the group chat has kept our little gang alive. a. (Every Wordle group chat has a member who gets it in three lines before anyone else has both eyes open, right?) Then there was the group I I have with some of my oldest best friends, which is the kind of group chat where jokes that make no sense to anyone else make me chuckle with laughter. Then there was an emoji-laden update about a group set up for an upcoming birthday party and, to balance it out, an update - complete with photos - from a neighbor about the problem of snails in his garden, as well as individual voice notes, which had arrived while I was sleeping, from my son and cousin in Thailand and South Africa respectively.
"My inbox n is just work, spam and newsletters that I don't know how to unsubscribe from," says my friend Simon. "My Instagram feed is beautiful to look at, but it's just entertainment, to scroll through with a pinch of salt. WhatsApp is the part on my phone where my real life happens."
With 2 billion users, WhatsApp is the most popular messaging platform in the world, ahead of Facebook Messenger (988 million) and WeChat (1.2 billion). Launched by Yahoo alums Brian Acton and Jan Koum in 2009, and acquired by Facebook five years later, WhatsApp has infiltrated our lives at every level, from international politics - Boris Johnson reportedly exchanged private messages with the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman - to school door politics. big spenders walk through the doors are now WhatsApp photos of the hottest new deliveries to preferred customers as they arrive in the store. Often the sale has taken place and the package has been shipped by courier without the clothes reaching the store.
But have we reached the peak of WhatsApp? Lockdown was the platform's age of innocence, with neighborhood group chats featuring pithy one-liners and an endless stream of chat videos keeping spirits up among lone co-workers working from home.
>As the honeymoon period fades, WhatsApp is starting to look like another workflow, on top of all those unanswered emails and voicemails you never listen. The blue tick system that indicates whether a message has been read by the recipient, which seemed so useful at first, has become a minefield of social etiquette.
Every morning before leaving for work, Rosie, a 28-year-old physiotherapist, chats with her three roommates. Sometimes they sympathize or celebrate the weather or football results; sometimes one of them has good news about a job interview to share or blows steam on their latest dating app disaster.
The friends have moved from the house they shared in Bristol last summer when they left university, and they now live in different towns, but their WhatsApp group, named after the road they lived on together, starts messaging around 7:30 a.m. most days. "I live alone now, and I miss having company," says Rosie. “Some of the others have moved back to their parents, which has its own challenges. We make each other laugh and we stay sane. We don't meet much, but the group chat has kept our little gang alive. a. (Every Wordle group chat has a member who gets it in three lines before anyone else has both eyes open, right?) Then there was the group I I have with some of my oldest best friends, which is the kind of group chat where jokes that make no sense to anyone else make me chuckle with laughter. Then there was an emoji-laden update about a group set up for an upcoming birthday party and, to balance it out, an update - complete with photos - from a neighbor about the problem of snails in his garden, as well as individual voice notes, which had arrived while I was sleeping, from my son and cousin in Thailand and South Africa respectively.
"My inbox n is just work, spam and newsletters that I don't know how to unsubscribe from," says my friend Simon. "My Instagram feed is beautiful to look at, but it's just entertainment, to scroll through with a pinch of salt. WhatsApp is the part on my phone where my real life happens."
With 2 billion users, WhatsApp is the most popular messaging platform in the world, ahead of Facebook Messenger (988 million) and WeChat (1.2 billion). Launched by Yahoo alums Brian Acton and Jan Koum in 2009, and acquired by Facebook five years later, WhatsApp has infiltrated our lives at every level, from international politics - Boris Johnson reportedly exchanged private messages with the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman - to school door politics. big spenders walk through the doors are now WhatsApp photos of the hottest new deliveries to preferred customers as they arrive in the store. Often the sale has taken place and the package has been shipped by courier without the clothes reaching the store.
But have we reached the peak of WhatsApp? Lockdown was the platform's age of innocence, with neighborhood group chats featuring pithy one-liners and an endless stream of chat videos keeping spirits up among lone co-workers working from home.
>As the honeymoon period fades, WhatsApp is starting to look like another workflow, on top of all those unanswered emails and voicemails you never listen. The blue tick system that indicates whether a message has been read by the recipient, which seemed so useful at first, has become a minefield of social etiquette.
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