Muting the Distraction: Group Chat Developments
Convenient, yes, but group chats can be distracting to the point of insanity – but there may be a solution.
Love them or hate them, group chat apps have become a common fixture of daily digital life. The reason for this is they offer a seemingly-efficient way to organize communication amongst large groups of people, whether it’s at work or in our social lives. It’s not uncommon these days to forego an email chain or Facebook event invitation in favor of the group chat. This means our phones fill with the chatter of the dinner parties, meetings and book clubs we’re meant to attend in the future—clouding our ability to focus on today.
Convenience or Nuisance?
The modes of group chat vary. There is Slack, and Basecamp for professional environments as well as the more popular WhatsApp and Facebook messenger for social occasions. While the service these apps offer may be efficient, not everyone is a fan of the all-chatter, all-the-time nature of these apps. As the founder of Basecamp, Jason Fried, wrote about the downside of group chat:
“Following group chat all day feels like being in an all-day meeting with random participants and no agenda. And in many cases, a dozen all-day meetings! You hear it from people all the time — it’s exhausting. Constant conversation, constant chatter, no start, no end. You can decide not to pay attention, but that leads to a fear of missing out.”
Tuning it Out
For a long time, there has been a mechanism by which people who want to opt out of group chat without taking the rather finalized step of leaving the group itself can politely duck out. On WhatsApp, this has taken the form of the mute function, which could be used for a few hours, a day, a week, or a year. However, WhatsApp has just introduced the feature of “@“ mention within groups—overriding the mute function. The Independent reported that “the feature is apparently intended as a way of allowing people to keep up with big group chats, and not to have to read or respond to every message but only to the relevant ones. The company has been looking to build up group chats – including changing the maximum group size from 100 to 256 people – and so the move appears to be a way of dealing with that.”
The Etiquette of it All
Despite the fact that WhatsApp made this update to increase functionality, many feel that the tyranny of group chat has gone too far. People feel there has to be a way to opt out of constant chatter without removing ourselves entirely from groups that we occasionally need to contribute to. While it can be very difficult in professional situations to opt out of groups we’re meant to be part of, in social situations it’s easier to speak up about our communication preferences. It is easier to set boundaries if we feel that our time and attention is being sacrificed. Just a polite message communicating that group chats tend to clutter up one’s phone and attention span, “So I’m opting out for now,” can make people aware that their endless chatter interrupts your day. Setting boundaries like this will go a long way to making people more aware of how they use the function.
Minimize the Distraction
It’s not that group chat is all bad, it’s that there has to be some kind of filter on it, or it loses its functionality. Basecamp’s founder sums it up well: “What we’ve learned is that group chat used sparingly in a few very specific situations makes a lot of sense. What makes a lot less sense is chat as the primary, default method of communication inside an organization. A slice, yes. The whole pie, no. All sorts of eventual bad happens when a company begins thinking one-line-at-a-time most of the time.