THE first wave of neighbourhood WhatsApp groups hit our suburb in the middle of the previous decade. What a brilliant idea, I initially thought. Now we can share meaningful information about safety, traffic issues, second-hand items and lost pets. But the groups were so quickly flooded with senseless and stifling information that I wanted to leave.
There was the Street group, the Zone group, the Greater Neighbourhood group, the Absolutely-Only-For-Emergencies group, the Neighbourhood Watch group, the Neighbourhood Watch Patrol Communication group, the Central Improvement District group and the Spirit group.
OK, I'm lying. There was an f-ton of information about lost pets.
We were signed up by WhatsApp missionaries in the street so we could make a start on “stemming the tsunami of crime in the neighbourhood". I'm not naive, but a “tsunami of crime" was perhaps hyperbolic. What I experienced was at most a fairly average wave (boogie board height) of opportunistic theft.
During this time, two gas bottles were carried out of our yard with a selection of my braai equipment, 2 km of garden hose, a blue bicycle without pedals, a pink bicycle with a white basket in front, a really nice yellow garden spade and an old sewing machine. All of it together still fell short of the sensible threshold of an insurance claim.
Anyway, my finger was hovering over the “Leave Group" button of the Neighbourhood Watch WhatsApp group when my eye fell on a photo of a fashionable young man with a cellphone in his hand. He was wearing a baseball cap with the flat visor (hip-hop style), sunglasses, a black hoodie and kick-arse sneakers. I copied the conversation that followed word for word from the group.
Before we continue, black men (known on WhatsApp groups as “bravo males") allegedly taking photos of houses make up at least 25% of the content on WhatsApp neighbourhood groups.
WhatsApper 1: “The guy is taking photos of houses in Kronkel Street."
WhatsApper 2: “Zone leader. Read you. Report received. Anyone confronting him now will get the photos on his phone. What do we do? Who do we contact?"
WhatsApper 3: “That's a question for the chairman."
WhatsApper 4 (the chairman): “As much as I'd like to grab him by the collar, I think we need to keep his civil rights in mind and also that he hasn't been caught red-handed in an illegal act. What he's doing is no different from what estate agents do every day. And do we confront them? No. However, we must remain vigilant as residents."
WhatsApper 2: “We hear daily of more burglaries than we see ‘estate agents' taking cellphone photos in our streets. We as residents shouldn't be crime profilers. If he's really an estate agent, I'm sure he won't mind being confronted by the SAPS. However, if he's an ‘investigating' crook and one of us confronts him politely, I'm sure he'll consider alternative ‘property opportunities'."
WhatsApper 5: “I agree 100%!"
MUCH LATER, TWO O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING
WhatsApper 6: “I confronted that man this afternoon. It was just a ‘poke-man' player." (sic)
NEXT MORNING
WhatsApper 7: “You can identify someone playing Pokémon Go by identifying the device they're using. [List of devices attached.] Don't be misled by someone with an old Blackberry in their hand! Also, learn the characters and use them in your interrogation. If you mention names like Krabby, Exeggcute, Pidgey, Slowpoke and Bullbaser, only to be greeted by a blank stare, you have your answer!"
That was it. After that I couldn't leave the group and possibly miss out on such prime quality entertainment (and also risk having a Slowpoke rummaging in my garden). I stayed.
Social media and our private lives
If social networks were to hold a beauty contest, WhatsApp would be eliminated in the first round. It's not as biting as X, as sexy as Instagram, as versatile as Facebook or as lively as TikTok.
WhatsApp is essentially just a list of groups where people talk under a round green logo reminiscent of a building society's. Yet, it has turned the world of instant communication upside down. Initially, I thought, “it's just like SMS". However, it immediately became the primary platform for my communication.
A large part of WhatsApp's success is also its weakness: the fact that you can so easily form a group.
One of the sophisticated communication principles that almost all people, from the lowest to the highest intelligence, in all classes, beliefs, and orientations, almost instinctively understand is that every person has a secret, a private, and a public personality and relationships. Few people think about it but everyone understands it.
The first few years of social media were so tumultuous because not everyone could transfer their instinctive understanding of communication boundaries to the virtual stages they were suddenly thrust onto. In the beginning, they also couldn't predict or understand the consequences of the amplification of statements on Facebook and Twitter, which sometimes led to sad consequences.
Social media platforms also quickly realised they had to make room for private and secret conversations. Twitter/X was the least bothered by this, as it has always been a virtual Speaker's Corner.
Facebook gives its users the most tools to mimic reality – settings where you can regulate your privacy uniquely with each “friend". Most people don't bother, though. People would rather restrict their behaviour to cause the least possible damage in the worst possible scenario.
We've been living with Facebook for almost 20 years, and the evolution of users' behaviour is remarkable. Sometimes one longs for the naive spontaneous behaviour of people on Facebook (almost never your own), but no one misses the late-night finger slips that led to pain and embarrassment.
WhatsApp, as a personal messaging app, differs from other social networks because you can't use it to make a fully public statement. You're always in a group, and thus limited. But WhatsApp gives you unlimited power to form groups of any permutation in an instant. This brings you close to how you can control your communication in reality.
The WhatsApp groups you become part of over the years are a complex three-dimensional network of Venn-type diagrams that make you a unique member of a unique group anyway.
My family has five members, and over the years WhatsApp groups have emerged in almost every permutation of these people. There's nothing sinister about this. A group with only four members might be named “Dad's gift", where a birthday present is discussed.
A group that includes only me and my two sons, for example, only has enthusiastic soccer discussions, because we're the soccer guys.
WhatsApp is a wonderful tool, even between just two people with a multidimensional relationship. For example, if a couple own a business together, it can help keep official matters out of the bedroom, which is quite necessary.
You can, for example, create a WhatsApp group between you and your partner for all ideas about your business that pop into your head between 6pm and 7am, so you can discuss them in a meeting at work instead of in the kitchen around dinner time.
You can also create a group where only accounting and tax matters are discussed, so these conversations are easier to revisit because they're not sitting in the sea of messages in a general group.
With your life partner, you can even create a group just for conflict. A fighting group. It sounds absurd, but there's a psychological sense in not polluting your general chat channel with your discord.
The trouble is in large groups
The knot with WhatsApp lies in the dynamics of larger groups that form around a shared interest, but with diverse members – culturally, educationally, ideologically, and in terms of prejudices and beliefs.
Many of these groups fail due to our inability to develop etiquette that all members adhere to. Those that survive are usually a shadow of what they were supposed to be, with many valuable members having left due to what they experience as an inhospitable environment.
These are the neighbourhood groups, or a sports club group, a group around a school reunion or a study group.
The golden rule is that people stick to the topic and keep opinions to a minimum. But life is also a nice place where friendships develop and stories add colour.
Take school reunion groups. Initially, everyone agrees on basic rules that politics, religion, racism and sexism are taboo.
My 30-year school reunion group was created a year before the party. After the initial stimulating experience of finding out how people are doing, what they're doing and where they are, the group settled into a daily rhythm, but with a surprising level of participation.
It was 2019 and it was as if people needed each other – as if the challenge of daily life drove people to familiar and affirming spaces. It's reassuring to be with people who have known you since before your puberty and life struggles and who experienced your teenage angst, first loves and first time getting drunk. These are people who don't easily judge you.
The online bullies take over
What I experienced on the WhatsApp group, however, was a dynamic that was different from physical life. The group's underlying power structure was similar to real life and back then at school, but some natural leaders were quiet in the background. Pareto's Law, which states that 20% of members are responsible for 80% of contributions in any group, was also not far off the mark.
However, I experienced that the group was from the outset searching for a narrowing ideology in which the large middle group feels comfortable, but which tolerated few deviations.
For example, there were two Christians who posted a kind of religious piece in the mornings. One was a pastor in the Apostolic Faith Mission and it was consistent with his nature from grade 1. His pieces were short and focused on practical life advice, and no one took offence. Another man, however, daily cut and pasted a long, sentimental, fundamentalist Christian piece from somewhere, in neat Afrikaans, while the poster in his own communication experienced great challenges with spelling and sentence construction. The posting was usually followed by a whole string of “Amens", “Praise Hims" and statements like “No, these are true words, true words" from other members.
The posts carried little meaning and contributed to the general disorder. Despite clearly violating the rules, no one addressed it, as this kind of religious practice is above criticism in some communities.
Although the idea was that it should also be a social group, several members almost moved their entire social life to the group, which meant certain inner group topics and ideologies dominated. This clearly put a damper on the rest of the group.
It was also noticeable that the dominant social circle on the group had little in common with the social dynamics when the class physically gathered.
Two members, let's call them Rooies and Vale (not their real names but their real nicknames), also seemed to derive particular satisfaction from maintaining a highly challenging level of racism, which included the explicit use of the k-word and other extremely derogatory terms. This wasn't an occasional statement here and there but central to their identity.
Two things surprised me about this. First, Rooies and Vale's prominence in the group was far above their social prominence at school and at the eventual reunion, where they were again reduced to the social fringe where they spent all evening on their brandy and Cokes. Second, there was very little resistance to this blatant violation of the rules and basic good manners and humanity.
The one or two times someone challenged Vale, for example, he reacted like a wilful child, threw a tantrum and left the group in a whirl (only to crawl back a day or two later). For instance, he once posted a nasty quote attributed to the German missionary and organist Albert Schweitzer, describing black people as inferior. The quote has been repeatedly confirmed as false.
When it was pointed out to him that a simple Google search would have spared him the embarrassment, he stormed out and slammed the virtual door behind him.
Eventually, the quality in the group suffered under the quantity. The less talented members without self-awareness overwhelmed and drove away the rest.
How do we develop an etiquette that can save larger WhatsApp groups? Perhaps it should become part of children's education. We all learned in school how to answer a phone, at home and in a business.
We learned how to write informal and formal letters. We even learned how to write a letter to collect debt. It's time for experts in online behaviour to compile a curriculum so our children can find their way online without the risks our generations had to face.
♦ VWB ♦
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