Everyone has left the room: The dynamics of group chat

It wasn’t until the outset of the pandemic that Sarah O’Dell fully awakened to the allure of the group chat. Stuck at home in Redding, Conn., with her husband and two children, she came to see how a nonstop conversation on her phone could provide welcome distraction, exchange of information and social support.

When her husband had a stroke, in early 2020, the six members of a trusted text chain that had formed before the pandemic “were checking in every few minutes.” Her husband quickly recovered, and the conversation carried on, gaining momentum as it dawned on the participants that it would be a while before they got together again. The group discussed books and movies, and delved into deep talks at all hours of the night. They traded fears about their parents’ death and notes on sightings of weirdos in the neighborhood. “You feel like comedy-writing partners in a good group text,” O’Dell said.

Or she used to, anyway. The jokes and neighborhood gossip have been coming in at an unsatisfying pace over the past six months, as pandemic fatigue has set in. “I experience a pang when it gets slow,” said O’Dell, 45, a content manager. “I panic and think: Is this the end?” The answer for a lot of group chats is yes. Like so many features of our lives these days, our text message chains are undergoing a great unravelling. No matter how stimulating, all conversations must eventually come to an end. Even — and perhaps especially — the texting conversations that emerged and kept us company in the early days of lockdown have grown quieter as pods have disintegrated, interpersonal dynamics have shifted, and people have tired of prattling on about the same old thing.

Jasmin Bollman, a freelance writer and marketing consultant in Ottawa, had long texted with her local friends en masse, to share memes or plan the occasional Friday night meet-up. But come spring 2020, the trusty thread had become the group’s primary forum for processing the news in real time.

“I found it all so overwhelming,” Bollman, 39, said. She recalled that whenever Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister, appeared on TV for a news conference, “it was like there was a need to be the first one to report what he was saying. But we were all literally watching the same thing!” So she started pulling away. “It felt like the world was ending, and I didn’t want one of my last things to be reading these group texts,” Bollman said. Soon enough, the others followed suit; the chat is effectively over. Group chats, like all chats, are not meant to go on forever. Scroll to the bottom of your messages and you’ll probably find a conversation long forgotten — a planning chain for a friend’s March 2020 surprise party, or a big group filled with contacts who fell off your social map when virtual happy hours stopped feeling fun. There wasn’t any drama; things just petered off, as they do.

For Ellen Schiller’s chain of three, the end was a bit more abrupt. “We were all texting constantly in the beginning of the pandemic, and it was so dark and entertaining,” said Schiller, a 50-year-old fiber artist in Salem, Mass., until the group’s other two members decided to start a college consulting business last spring. Sitting alone at her sewing machine, Schiller paused every time she was tempted to share an observation with her friends. The idea of them sitting side by side and reading her missive in each other’s company made her feel out of the loop. “They’re like a married couple now,” she said. “I don’t begrudge them, but I really miss what we had.”