Always minus someone: WhatsApp’s side-chat/gossip

SEPTEMBER 15 — There is the official group: Family, office, old classmates who still pretend the Form 5 reunion is happening. Everyone is in it. Birthdays get a sticker. Political links get communally ridiculed. Lunch photos are shared. Blah blah blah.

Then there is the other group which consists of the same people — minus one. Sometimes minus two.

Given a name so bland it could pass as a logistics chat, and immediately put to its real use: Talking about the person who is not there.

If this sounds familiar, congratulations. You have either built one of these groups, sat inside one, or — the more interesting fate — you are the missing name.

The unofficial supplement WhatsApp facilitates and certainly did not invent: Gossip. It merely removed the last inconvenience.

A brief history of gossip

Once upon a time you needed a corridor, a kopi-o, a lowered voice. Now you need a few ticks, a contact list and hopefully people’s generally acquiescence with being involuntarily added to a group.

But going even further back, gossip may have begun with hands; primates nurturing alliances by grooming: time-consuming, one-to-one, limited by how many backs you can scratch before sunset.

Robin Dunbar’s argument, now a kind of origin myth in this field, is that language arrived as cheaper grooming I.e. talk let us service several relationships at once.

And what did we talk about? In sampled conversations, social topics — who did what to whom — take up around two-thirds of the airtime.

Gossip, in this telling, is not a later “corruption” of speech, it may be why speech was worth evolving in the first place.

The WhatsApp icon is seen on a smartphone in this undated image. — AFP pic

Gossip tracks reputations. It flags free-riders and serves as a release valve for felt injustices.

It teaches the unwritten rules faster than any official briefing. Baumeister et al treated it as a manual for group life: how we learn what “we” will and will not tolerate (see note 1).

Gossip gathers norms and it bonds the people doing the gathering. Experiments show pairs who trade talk about absent others often leave more aligned, and sometimes more cooperative.

The research does not baptise the WhatsApp splinter group. It only explains why the habit feels so old.

We did not invent talking about the missing person. We inherited it, then gave it a group name bland enough to look like logistics.

Back to WhatsApp groups (minus one)

What is striking is not that people complain about each other. People have always done that.

What is fresh is the architecture. The main group remains the public face of belonging. The side group is the disavowed extra — the place where the actual judgments and “real talk” live.

Call it the unofficial supplement of friendship: The official chat says we are close. The unofficial one decides who is allowed to be close enough.

Why bother? Because talking about someone who cannot answer back is strangely bonding. Shared irritation is cheaper than shared vulnerability. You do not have to risk a fight. You just add everyone except them and let the comments do the work.

There is also a little power in it, right? As in, who gets to create the smaller room? Who decides the guest list?

For people who feel slightly ignored in the big group, the splinter chat is a promotion. Suddenly they are curators of the real conversation.

Finally, perhaps the most humbling aspect of this entire phenomenon. Always remember: There is almost certainly a group of your friends which— for whatever reason — doesn’t include you.

Note 1: Two helpful works on gossip include Dunbar, R. I. M. (1996). Grooming, gossip and the evolution of language. Harvard University Press and Baumeister, R. F., Zhang, L., & Vohs, K. D. (2004). Gossip as cultural learning. Review of General Psychology, 8(2), 111–121.