Caroline O'Donoghue: 'There is no way to leave a WhatsApp group without upsetting everyone in it'

A few years ago, when I was still a proper journalist, I was asked to do a piece on ‘digital detoxing’. It was amid headlines about how the average adult person checks their phone 70,000 times a day, or something, and there were many studies about social media’s links to mental illness and depression. All of this information, which was faintly surprising then, is now considered so obvious that to point it out in normal conversation would make you a crashing bore. Yes, we know that the phones are killing us. We know they’re eroding our concentration, our self-esteem, our ability to appreciate the physicality of life. And most of us have, in some ways, tried to correct that behaviour. We turn notifications off, we delete social media apps, we turn down the screen brightness.

The phone hygiene movement makes sense, but it has always annoyed me a little, mostly because I think it focuses on the wrong things. I’ll admit, I have a bias here. I have an active social media presence on Instagram and Twitter, something that is partly to do with my career path and its reliance on social media for publicity, and partly to do with my personality. I like shooting things out into space, sometimes. I work long days, and I have no colleagues, and sometimes when I’m boiling the kettle I’ll take a selfie or tweet my theories on t.A.T.u's first album. For me, it takes the place of water cooler conversation.

I don’t really reply to anyone who responds to me. These missives are attention-seeking, not conversation-seeking. We have a lot of negative connotations to the term ‘attention-seeking’, usually because most of us first heard the term when we were seven and acting up at a birthday party. We associate it with over-tired children, palms clammy with melted Smarties, spinning around and screaming until they are sick. But wanting attention isn’t, in itself, a terrible thing. I know writers who tweet about their word counts, and parents who Instagram their screaming babies, and it all amounts to the same thing. It is them saying: I am doing something here, and it’s really hard. I don’t need to talk about it, I just need people to see that this invisible effort is happening.

I notice this the most from my friends who are new mothers. The exhausted selfies of 4am feeds are like flares being shot into the sky from a kayak that is miles out from the harbour. “I’m here!” they say. “I can’t do much but paddle, but I’m here!” 

This, I notice, is the kind of phone use that we find easy to demonise. It is very visible, and it is open to interpretation, and it is easy to interpret these posts in bad faith. Calling someone ‘obsessed’ with social media when it is one of few outlets that helps them remain visible feels a little cruel. I also notice that, while we are very keen to tell people to get off social and advise them to spend less time on their phone, we are still holding them to an extremely high standard of personal correspondence. Emails, text messages, and most eternally demanding of all, WhatsApp.

There’s a longstanding argument that the vacuum cleaner did not make housework easier, it just increased the standards for a clean house. No one was thinking about lint before we were told we could get rid of all the lint. I think a similar thing has happened with Whatsapp. While the presumption with text messages was that you would respond when you had time, the ever-flickering status changes of WhatsApp – from ‘online’, to ‘last online at 15.36’, to the double-check read receipts – has subtly changed communication so that we are expected to be available to chat all day.

Talk to most people, and they will tell you that they are in one or two Whatsapp groups that are basically never offline. 

They tick constantly away throughout the working day and well into the evening, chat and links to news stories and forwarded videos coming in and out like the tides. If there are six people in this Whatsapp group, five of them are amazed at where all the others find the time to reply. There is no way to leave one, it seems, without upsetting everyone in it. 

Further, if you reply to one, you are sending a message to every member that you are open for business, and then they can start individual conversations with you that can go on for any length of time and can be about absolutely nothing.

Obviously the pandemic has made social networks like Whatsapp groups absolutely invaluable, and for many people, have been the closest thing to simulating a group dinner party. 

This is also not a dig at my own WhatsApp groups, which I am variously active and quiet on, depending on the day. 

I just wonder whether we’ve trapped ourselves in an extremely demanding cycle of communication that keeps us permanently on our phones, while simultaneously decrying public-facing social media as the reason we’re all anxious.

I recently completed a demanding work deadline, and when I turned it in, the person I was working with told me to take ‘a good long break’. So I did. I took three days off. I then received a phone call, asking why I wasn’t responding to emails. “You said to take a break!” I responded, exasperated. Yes, came the response, but not from emails. Just from work. “But the emails ARE work!” I felt like saying. Which is often the attitude when we talk about ‘taking a break’ from our phones. “Good idea. Take a break,” we’re told. “Just not from me.”