“You have 152 unread Facebook messages.”
Oh boy, better start scrolling!!!
Group chats are one of those things that you can easily love or hate depending on what day it, at least from my personal experiences. They’re absolutely a great way to stay connected to your friends, but they also serve as a no-holds open forum to either spam your friends' phones, have a “GIF War” or have a nice “pick on me session.” Though it could also be everyone posting a picture of their dog or telling the group that they just got a fantastic new part time job.
Currently, I have two group chats going on in my phone. One is for the people I will live with next semester, which we will use to communicate with each other for when we start living together in the fall. The other one is comprised of all of my closest college buddies. “The Friend Group” if you will. And let me tell you, it is both the best and worst thing I’m a part of. We use it mainly to bug each other, or at least that’s what it seems like sometimes. First off, we all have nicknames that out of context, make no sense and have little to no consistency. Some of these nicknames include (at least that’s what they were when I wrote this) “Jerry’s Mac and Cheese,” “The Fart Dealer,” “The Milk Man,” and then just a pineapple emoji followed by a pizza emoji. As you can see, it gets pretty creative, and they are subject to change at literally any given moment without warning.
We also use the chat to post endless amounts of pictures we took on a certain day, or to bring up a hundred ugly pictures of me (yes, that did just happen, and maybe it was the inspiration for this article, but I digress). It’s a way for us to remember the fun times we had together on a Friday night from last semester, or to show the group the pictures of our band playing at the outdoor concert. But we also use it to tell random thoughts we have throughout the day, and maybe it’ll start a conversation among a few group members. Or maybe it will just go unnoticed (let’s face it, half of what actually gets posted gets glossed over). But then we use it to say “Hey this amazing thing just happened to me” and you’ll always get a quick “woo” or a “yay” from some group members. It keeps us all connected, especially when we’re all on break for the summer.
While my college friends’ group chat can annoy me to no end, it’s also something that keeps me happy to be a part of. There is literally never a dull moment in my friend group and I can always scroll through the chat and get a quick laugh whenever I’m a little down. I’ll never “mute” the conversation because I’ll probably miss something funny or important. And I’m pretty sure that even after college when we all graduate, we’ll still all use the chat to say, “Hey, this is what I’m doing as a real adult now.” And we’ll all respond “that’s nice,” in our typical fashion.
