One of my work besties recently dropped a link into our group chat.

“Pretend you’re Black,” she wrote.

She is a university professor creating a groundbreaking new online survey for Black journalists in Canada. This was her way of saying, Hey, friend! Can you click through these multiple-choice questions to make sure they work?

With a sudden pang of nostalgia for Twitter jokes, I wrote back swiftly.

“Hold my beer.”

She reacted with a laugh. (The link worked, by the way.)

That exchange just wouldn’t have happened if it were over Twitter (sorry, X). And I never would have been so breezy, especially not when race is involved, on LinkedIn. As an Asian woman working in media who has been on social media for its entire life cycle, being cautious with my words in public is something I’ve come by honestly. I also don’t write anything in email (or even Slack at work) that I wouldn’t want forwarded to or screencapped for someone other than the intended recipient. Overly cautious? Given what I’ve seen over the years, I think this is a wise practice.

In contrast, the group chat is intimate, real and safe, especially for those of us who are old enough to remember a time before social media, when we would only kiki in person. In the early 2000s, when there was no social media and no smartphones, and I was learning how to adult, if I had anything juicy, I would save it for in-person whispers over drinks. If I tried that today, I would be whispering to myself all day in my wine closet.

We need group chats to stay sane. A recent survey conducted by Media Technology Monitor of 4,000 newcomers to Canada found that 81 per cent of respondents use messaging apps, many of us to stay in touch with family back home, replacing the use of phone cards, which had the added benefit of making communication far more accessible, and affordable. My parents used to shout into the landline, precious minutes ticking as they gave warm but brief greetings and updates to family in Korea. Today, on KakaoTalk, they can message with all the digital ephemera (baby videos! Comedy! News clips!) with sisters, brothers and old friends. Incredible. 

Professionally speaking, though, for my generation, the rise of group chats—which began after Apple introduced the ability to text multiple people at once in 2008, and WhatsApp launched in 2009—feels like a reaction to the hypervigilance we’ve learned to use on social media. Comparing the vibe, social media is going to the club, and group chats are piling onto the sofa at home afterwards, kicking off your shoes and laughing about the night.

There’s fun to be had, but also real career debriefing and mentorship, in a much safer place than the wide open internet. This is especially important for my peer group. In 2021, the Coalition for Women in Journalism listed countries where women journalists experience the most coordinated online attacks and Canada was at the top of the list. It proved what we already knew. My group-chat friends and I are all women journalists, many of us from immigrant households, most of us racialized, several of us parenting trans children. We have seen too many people being attacked for their identity, too many vile, dehumanizing comments to be casual on social media with what we say (or, more accurately, “publish”). But this isn’t just a place to back-channel professional conversations that aren’t necessarily for public view; we plain enjoy each other’s company. It’s friendship, the words version. 

Lately, though, I’ve been learning the limitations of group chatting. For starters, text-based communication is inherently limiting. Research from the 1960s showed that when it comes to emotions, meaning is mostly conveyed through tone and body language. More recent research has found that 18 per cent of adults have had a falling out over textual miscommunication—41 per cent had jokes taken the wrong way, and 42 per cent had their sarcasm go undetected. But perhaps most importantly, unless you’re messaging in real time, group chatting is also essentially a solo act. A real conversation has an element of unpredictability, taking shape over time, as two or more people connect over ideas, evolving their thoughts together through connection.

In a strange way, this has taken me back to the pandemic. With schools closed, I was thinking a lot about education as my small kids wandered the house all day like ghosts in jogging pants with nowhere to go. At the time, I learned that Ursula Franklin, the famed science educator, said that technology impedes education when it separates people in time and space. Without sharing time and space, true education isn’t possible. 

Recently, I’ve started to think about friendship this way too. These apps provide a space, sure, but how often are the group chats going off with everyone there at the same time? In a time-starved and convenience-driven world, this is increasingly difficult to manage. Off-line, there are fewer third spaces where we can meet—even imperfect ones devoted to commerce, like the mall. And while group chats may feel like a solution to this problem, I’m not sure this is actually universal.

The most successful group chats, which are really the most successful friendships, take it off-line occasionally, for one-on-one calls or in-person meetups. Yes, it takes effort. But group chats aren’t a safe space simply because they exist in opposition to the public stage of social media. They are only as buoyant and life-giving as the relation­ships themselves, which need to be tended with real time and space connection. The best ones are a mix of what’s in the phone and what’s out in the world.

The other morning, one of my group chats lit up with unexpected, heartfelt messages. A friend sent a voice note from the back of a cab, on her way to give a talk at a journalism panel. She was reflecting on how grateful she was to have us. We all chimed in and it went from tears of gratitude to jokes in three messages flat. But we could do that only because we’d recently seen each other at a gala, where we supported one of our own by being the rowdiest table. Without that recent real-world interaction, though, it may have felt like we were glossing over a moment of sincerity.

It feels increasingly clear to me that my digital communication has to happen in tandem with synchronous interactions, even if that’s on Zoom or FaceTime or the good old-fashioned phone—other ways of being together that offer more richness than the words we thumb-tap out. So, ironically, it seems taking it out of the app is the best way to keep those group chats alive. And isn’t that what we all need?