Group texting: a benefit or a bane?

May 2013

We all know of the social cliques rooted in school campuses, but now with new technology cyber cliques have also begun to form.

Apple iPhone messenger, as well as other applications such as the Kik messenger app, now allow people to communicate in groups via one thread.

“It's pretty neat because you don't have to send individual messages to a select few,” said Senior Andrew Cardozo, “but instead send the messages to the entire group.”

Group messages, or “grexts” as they are called in some circles, allow for a continuous conversation with multiple people, that can begin in person and never end over text.

“Group messages are an efficient way to talk to more than one friend at once and they're good for planning. But they can be distracting and hard to keep up with,” said junior Isabella Sziraczky.

Just as text messaging and other forms of socialization take time and focus away from work and school, so do group messages.

“[Group messages] are distracting when more than one person is trying to talk and make comments,” continued Cardozo.

These conversations can continue for hours, taking up time that people would normally be spending on other things.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, kids ages 8-18 now spend, on average, 7.5 hours in front of a screen each day, three of which are for phones and other such devices.

“Because they are constantly being used, group messages need to be looked at a lot,” said junior Pasha Minkovsky, “if you put your phone down, even for a little, you can miss a ton of messages and then have to spend time scrolling up to figure out what everyone is discussing.”

By adding extra “screen time” to the already large three hours used daily by social networking and other activities, group messaging pulls people into never ending conversations about constantly changing topics.

In some ways, when people create group messages they are also creating a new social group. For some this is a way to bring more people together, but for others it does the exact opposite.

“Group messages keep you in the loop on what your friends are doing, [and they] can bring some serious entertainment,” said senior Michelle Swarovski.

This entertainment, however, can sometimes come at the expense of other friends as group messages allow for cliques to form within cliques adding for social tensions within groups of friends and disengagement of others.

“Group messages can be really good for the people in the message but it also excludes others and gives them a sense of marginalization,” continued Minkovsky.

Group messaging enables a select few to create special ties to others in the group in the form of inside jokes, references, and memories.

In creating these ties between some people, group messaging can push others to the side and account for a sense of loneliness and disparagement among friends that many teenagers face.

“In the end, group messages are good and bad- it really just depends on the situation,” said Minkovsky.

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