Overwhelmed by group chat messages? You’re not alone

For lots of us, group chats are a part of the feel of our social lives. These groups, formed on apps like Messenger or Whatsapp, might be as large as 100 people or as small as three.

We use them for organising one-off tasks or events, managing recurring coordination between groups like sports clubs or work teams, and keeping in contact with family and friends.

In the most effective cases, group chats can provide vital spaces for constructing and maintaining relationships. They might be places of joy, solidarity and refuge.

But they will also be burdensome, and create feelings of hysteria and worry. I researched group chat dynamics and these are the three biggest issues I encountered.

1. You’re overwhelmed by the quantity of messages

The volume of messages and notifications group chats generate might be overwhelming.

In my very own researcha participant recalled by chance leaving her phone at home, and returning to seek out she’d missed 200 messages in a gaggle chat about buying a birthday gift.

Another explained that their most lively group chat kicked off at 8am and didn’t cool down until 1am.

A recent survey of individuals within the United States and United Kingdom suggests this can be a common problem, with 40% of the respondents indicating they were overwhelmed with group chat messages and notifications. And then there’s notifications from email, social media, calendars, news apps, and so forth.

People often manage this by muting group chats. But this could mean missing vital information or plans to catch up, or having to dip out and in of the group chat to envision for relevant conversations.

People can even find the chaos of group chat conversations overwhelming. In large groups, multiple conversations might be running without delay, making it hard to maintain track of what’s being discussed or planned.

These problems could make group chats ineffective for the tasks they were arrange to finish. Especially in large groups of acquaintances, planning can devolve into a multitude of opinions, alternatives and side conversations.

One participant in my research described a gaggle chat a few birthday gift getting sidetracked by two people having their very own catch up.

Another recounted a disastrous group chat involving 20 people attempting to organise a potluck dinner. Rather than reaching a consensus about who would bring what, the conversation devolved right into a debate about whether potlucks were a nasty idea, with one person insisting skilled catering would higher account for dietary requirements.

2. You don’t need to be there – but can’t leave

Other, possibly more significant, challenges are the difficult or awkward social dynamics that may arise. The ease of making groups and adding members means people might be included in groups they wouldn’t have chosen to hitch.

In one instance of this, a girl was added to a gaggle for organising a shared gift for a colleague. She would have preferred to not contribute to the gift but found it too awkward to depart.

Challenging dynamics can even arise when relationships change after a gaggle chat has been established.

One participant told me a few group chat began by 4 close friends after they began university. A yr later, one person had grown distant and grow to be largely silent within the group chat, although the opposite three still used it to talk and organise catch ups. My participant found this dynamic incredibly awkward and had grow to be cautious about starting group chats consequently.

Other participants described feeling trapped in group chats they would favor to depart. The blunt “x has left the group” notification made them reluctant to formally quit but ignoring the group was also uncomfortable.

Many of those challenges stem from the rigid membership of group chats (you’re either in otherwise you’re out) which doesn’t all the time gel with the complexity of our relationships. These challenges can also be exacerbated by unclear or contested social etiquette around group messaging.

3. You feel excluded

The most difficult issues arise when processes of social exclusion play out in group chats.

Back channel groups can emerge, where some group members create a brand new group to privately communicate about what’s happening within the major chat.

In probably the most dramatic cases, participants described people getting kicked out of groups due to disagreements or because someone felt the group chat had grow to be too large.

Research suggests that being faraway from a gaggle is rare and mostly occurs when a relationship has ended.

But guessing whether you’ve been excluded from a gaggle chat might be cause for anxiety, especially because you may not only be missing out on gossip and cat videos but additionally plans to catch up in person.

So what are you able to do?

Our relationships with one another might be weird, awkward and messy – group chats reflect this social reality but with an added layer of technological complexity thrown in.

Generally, research suggests that the group chats people enjoy most are smaller groups with closer friends.

So, until app design improves and we collectively work out etiquette for awkward group chat moments, your best bets are to:

• use group chats with a handful of people that know one another, or who you’re confident will get along

• find one other way of organising that potluck. Use other types of organisation for more complex events or with larger groups (invitations, Facebook events or one-on-one texts)

• mute those crazy chats in the event you’re scuffling with distraction or aren’t that interested. Muting is common and increasingly expected. If the chat is usually used for organising stuff you don’t need to miss, let someone within the group know so that they can keep you posted or make a routine of checking in

• in the event you’re feeling weird about some group chat social dynamics, raise it with the person within the group best. We could make a number of assumptions about what other people’s messaging behaviours mean but the shortage of additional social cues mean our assumptions might be off. That person won’t be avoiding you – they may just have the chat muted!