The Absurdity of Whatsapp for Event Planning

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Yesterday it happened again on Whatsapp. Someone said ‘avoid having too much chatter on this group, there are hundreds of people. When I see such messages it frustrates me because at its core Whatsapp is designed for people to have conversations. The idea that we would join Whatsapp chats, to speak very little, to me is absurd. Whatsapp is designed for instant messaging. This is not a cloister where we have taken a vow of silence. This is a social network.

If I had written twenty messages and no one else had written anything then I’d think "Maybe we overdid it", but if a person writes one message, and another responds, that is not a flood. That a fool would then say "avoid conversing here, there are hundreds of people" infuriates me.

This isn’t the first time. Last Autumn some twit said the same thing, but then tried to stir up a flame war against me. I left the whatsapp group, and I dumped the Meetup group for a simple reason.

Not everyone lives in Geneva, or Lausanne. IM clients such as whatsapp, and others, allow people who live "remotely" to converse people before deciding to meet in person. There was a time when I drove into Geneva two to three times per day, from Nyon. I used up to a petrol tank every two or three days as a result.

Eventually I lost that bad habit, but by losing that bad habit I lost my social network in Geneva. People in Geneva never leave Geneva. They think that there is nothing in the countryside. In reality the countryside is as full of things to do as Geneva, especially on a Sunday, when everything is closed.

When you live in Nyon, and you socialise with groups in Geneva, or Lausanne, then using whatsapp for IM conversations is a way of keeping in touch with people without spending thousands of francs per year on petrol and train tickets. Using Whatsapp for conversations, with a running group, for example, is a way of establishing two things. Is this group likeminded, are the people friendly, and is it worth skipping a Saturday hike in the mountains to go into Geneva to see these people.

By sending that tiny message the message I got was clear. "We’re insular people stuck in our own little world who don’t understand that good conversations on Whatsapp encourage people to participate in person."

The Beauty of 2006-2007 Twitter

Back in 2006-2007, for a few months Twitter was a fantastic place for meeting new people. It was a network of friends of friends. We spent hours, and hundreds of messages having deeply engaged conversations. The conversations, online, were so great, that we wanted to meet in person.

What struck us at the time is that everyone we met felt like an old friend. It’s as if we had been friends for years, rather than weeks or months. It was tight knit and healthy. Of course I had the reality distortion field of being in London but the premise remains. By conversing online, meeting in person was more convivial.

The Anti-Social Vibe

By saying "Don’t converse here" the message is clear. ‘We’re anti-social and don’t like outsiders’ and the message was amplified with the sending of two audio messages. I don’t know what was said in those messages but I will never listen to them.

strike 1: Discourage conversation

strike 2: respond with an audio message rather than text

strike 3: sending a second message after the first

There might be no weight to what was written, and shared, but for me, in this day and age, sending two messages, and for them to be audio breaks a fundamental rule of social networks. Social networks, and especially IM based social networks should be for online conversations before offline conversations and activities.

Stifled Conversation

There is a cost, to people not wanting to have conversations via an IM client, and that is that Whatsapp only shows the messages, from the time we join a chat, to the moment we leave it. If people arrive late then messages have to be repeated.

By making it taboo to converse, it also forces the organiser to repeat information, over, and over again. It also means that in a situation where we know an answer, we can’t answer, out of fear that we will be told that we are too verbose.

The only questions I see are "Is the group full?" "Does someone have a space from Geneva?" and this style of question.

At the end of an activity too we have to be careful not to be verbose. We can share photos, in HD, but we can’t chatter.

Fast Walking

I walk fast. I walk at up to six kilometres per hour. Around a week or two ago the group was walking on a road, up a gradient road. I went from being behind the group to the front within a few minutes of walking at full speed. It’s relevant to the whatsapp conversation taboo.

I walk fast, so unless I choose to walk at someone else’s pace I am at the front. I’m an introvert, and a textrovert. I like to chat with people via text. I started a nine month relationship via written messages in a noisy club.

By making it taboo to chat via whatsapp my favourite conversation medium is off limits. In the metoo age if I IM without permission I risk being in trouble, and in person I might desire to converse, but because I am an introvert I am very often ignored.

And Finally

It’s not that I disagree with avoiding full blown conversations on Whatsapp, especially in groups of strangers. It’s that I feel that if we exchange two or three messages it shouldn’t be treated as a crime. It’s two or three messages.

At the end of the day I was going to break my habit of avoiding Geneva because of how insular its’ people are. With last night’s two audio messages that I will never listen to I am seriously thinking of quitting that group. In fact I did, just now. Was I told off? I haven’t a clue. My anxiety went up and my happiness took a hit, and for those two reasons I quit the group. It’s the audio messages that pushed me over the edge. If it had been text I might have tolerated it. Audio was an invasion of privacy.