Your favourite phone chat app and mine, WhatsApp, is getting a major new update. Version 2.19.10 has already rolled out on Android phones, and it’s about to hit iOS too. It will bring the ability to put stickers on GIFs and photos (be still my beating heart!), and sneakily read new messages without the sender seeing those incriminating blue ticks next to your name.
Finally, you’ll be able to send a private message to someone in a group chat without leaving the group chat window. If reading this news has momentarily frozen the very blood in your veins, know that you are one of my people.
Because how much drama is this update going to cause?
A couple of years ago, I was part of a WhatsApp group that imploded. We were a bawdy crew of idiots, cracking jokes and sharing woes. One day someone typed something bizarre and apropos of nothing in the group chat window, and suddenly people started leaving the group in droves. Other people got shouty. It took me a minute to realise what had happened: a private chat had been set up, to mean-spiritedly discuss a particular member of the group, and that conversation had accidentally spilled out into the main group chat window.
Our group limps on today, nominally on Facebook, but also in small splinter groups on WhatsApp. They are a shadow of the large group’s former glory. I miss those guys; their chats really brightened up my day (and if you’re reading this, wondering if I mean you, I mean you).
But my point is, with WhatsApp’s new update, this sort of thing is likely to happen on a global scale. How many fat thumbs in how many countries across the world are going to cause irretrievable social schisms by bitching in the wrong window? The answer is millions; possibly billions. I don’t mean to be alarmist when I say I think we have the possibility of a third world war on our hands.
WhatsApp is problematic anyway; the interface might be easy and intuitive to use, but the etiquette it demands can be mentally draining. Being added to a new group is like unexpectedly walking into a room full of people, and in this situation I pull exactly the same socially awkward shtick in WhatsApp as I do in real life: reel off three or four jokes that don’t quite hit the mark, then try to pretend I’m invisible forever.
Particularly annoying are the groups where no one’s online at the same time as each other, so when you pick up your phone after a long break, your screen’s just full of unanswered “hey”s at six-hour intervals. Then there are the really active groups – groups set up for events like weekends away and hen nights are notorious for this – where everyone seems to know each other but are, to you, just a list of chatty phone numbers.
Yet more annoying are the constant phone notifications when two people in your group are having a private chat in the public group. Anyone who’s been notified that someone in their group has typed the word “lol – and then hasn’t immediately hurled their phone into the nearest volcano – has my unending respect.
Is there anything quite as crushing in the modern day as being ghosted on WhatsApp? Especially if they neglect to do the decent thing and block you, so you can have your heart trampled every time you see when they’re online but just choosing not to answer your messages?
Only slightly more excruciating than this is the realisation that you may be inadvertently doing this to someone else – because you’ve read their message, composed a response in your head, then entirely forgotten to send it – except when you’re in the shower, awake at 3am, or any other time when your phone isn’t readily to hand.
The most irritating thing I find about WhatsApp, however, is when you need to get in touch with someone, but it turns out they’re the sort of high-toned ponce who’s morally opposed to WhatsApp because it’s owned by Facebook. Not only does this make you feel like crap, because you know one some level that they’re right and that you’re not as principled as they are, but also because you now have to text them or, even worse, use your phone to talk to them with your voice. Everyone knows phones aren’t for talking. Phones are for apps, and for browsing Instagram on the loo. This isn’t the 1990s. You aren’t a barbarian.
The sad fact is, I will continue to use WhatsApp, even though it’s owned by Big Data who are presumably stealing all my information to entrap me in The Matrix come the robot revolution. I’ll still use it, because it’s easy and free, and the most convenient way to stay in touch with the people I care about. And, frankly, so long as they don’t delete the “mute conversation” feature, they’ve got a lifelong customer in me