My current group chat, what others would call ‘The Boys Chat’, represents the group I fit into. It is a group named something odd I will not be disclosing in this blog post and is a Facebook Messenger group conversation that has now been active for about 4 years. This chat consists of 8 members, all of whom are close friends of mine since I began high school before group chats were really a thing I knew about. – And to check if the use of group chats among teenagers just wasn’t really a thing before I began using them or whether I was just an ignorant 13-year-old, I tweeted this question to the unit hashtag:
While everyone is on Twitter, what year did you first join a group chat on messenger, snapchat etc. #ALM101
— Oscar Lang (@BigOboyy) April 17, 2018
-To which I got a variety of responses including someone who used Yahoo messenger in 2008, someone who only ever used them for schoolwork and another person who had begun using a Messenger group chat in 2017 to stay connected to family.
These responses indicate that indeed group chats had been around before I began using them and for different purposes. However, my focus in this blog post is my own belief that the group chat, for me, is a place where conversation continues as if me and my friends were sitting at the pub. An online space where the barriers of self-consciousness and acceptable discussion is overcome. Going back on my survey about when people first began using group chats, I would also like to address the idea that teens have shifted to using ‘narrowcasting’ mediums instead of ‘broadcasting’ mediums.
The generic and the curious:
If you take a look at all the millions of threads created on various sites by young people seeking advice on all the bizarre experiences of growing up, it would seem the internet has provided one giant platform for a few generations now to share familiar troubles and joys about a time of developing identity. While anonymity on the now less popular discussion boards of the earlier 2000s allowed many questions to be answered without risking one’s image, I now suspect that the advent of better messaging platforms means many people have turned to in-depth conversations among close friends.
While it was once a common belief that the online world couldn’t foster ‘meaningful’ conversation, we now know that some people may even depend on honest and personal conversations with others online to maintain a relationship. In a journal article by Stephanie Tong et al. (Tong 2011, p. 109), Tong states that ‘because disclosure is so important in online relationships, content [of conversations] may reflect both positive and negative aspects of the relationship’. This idea translates into my own perception of the dynamics in a group chat, whereby my own group chat serves as a place for unreserved behaviours and ideas, but may also harbor conflict. The topics of conversation in the group chat have revealed very interesting truths about each of us and I believe this is what has indeed allowed us to remain close as a group despite our dispersal after school. The same bizarre experiences that people more commonly started threads for on discussion boards in the 2000s are the ones subject to discussion within a our group chat. But how is this different to the way in which we present our public self online? How are our public profiles structured differently?
It seems that we engage in a kind of sterilization of our online activity when it is public, something I think everyone unknowingly conforms to unless they are acting in a transgressive way. To me, Marshall’s ‘Transgressive Intimate Self’ (Marshall 2010, p. 45) only truly comes out on one’s ‘public’ profile during unusual circumstances, as I summarized in this tweet:
When it comes to the idea of a ‘true’ self in media, I think the only real authenticity comes from ‘Transgressive’ behaviour. The problems and nuances of people’s lives only come out on public profiles due to unusual circumstances like crisis or when drunk etc. #ALM101
— Oscar Lang (@BigOboyy) April 10, 2018
Note that I said ‘problems and nuances’, primarily because it’s quite true to me that all the ‘problems and nuances’ of life -the things that we naturally base conversation on- are things I’m able to talk over in my group chat and wouldn’t usually feel were appropriate to vent at random on a public profile, although this is something people do when attempting to ‘reach-out’. That is unless I’m in an altered mindset and humility goes out the window.
But, is the same attitude true for everyone else my age?
According to this article by Felicity Duncan, Assistant Professor of Digital Communication and Social Media at Cabrini College, (The Conversation 2016): ‘kids are opting out of the online public square’ and now favour ‘ephemerality’. Meaning that young people are opting for social platforms that allow them to produce fleeting expressions that are sent to a more exclusive audience. (My own observation of this is my increased use of the ‘group chat’ of course but also the platform known as Snapchat.) Professor Duncan later states one of the causes of this; the chance to get a ‘break from the need to police [your own] online image’, a very valid explanation that supports my belief on how we ‘sterilize’ our public image.
In summary, I can say ‘yes’ to my final question, I think it is absolutely true nowadays that young people, myself included, have decided to approach the online world as a place to treat their public identity with duality. Kids know the risks and as a result keep the public profiles safe and let our personality reign free in the group chat.
References:
Tong, S & Walther, J 2011, ‘Relational Maintenance and CMC’, Computer-mediated Communication in Personal Relationships, chapter 6, pp. 98-118
Marshall, PD 2010, ‘The promotion and presentation of the self: celebrity as marker of presentational media’, Celebrity Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 35-48.
Duncan, F 2016, ‘So long social media: the kids are opting out of the online public square’, The Conversation, retrieved 17 April 2018, <https://theconversation.com/so-long-social-media-the-kids-are-opting-out-of-the-online-public-square-53274>