WhatsApp groups are the root of all evil at uni

I can see your blue ticks stop ignoring me

national noad

So you’ve made it through first year, made all your friends and split off into separate houses. So how do you keep in touch with everyone? It’s easy. It’s inevitable. You start a WhatsApp group.

Everything is good for a while, you organise whose house you’re all going to pre-drink at and who wants to come over to ours to watch Frozen tonight. Life is good.

But don’t fall for it. Soon, somebody else starts a new group for a birthday or a separate group for the pub quiz team. This is where the trouble starts.

As soon as the first group chat is created it will inevitably become battle of the admin. This girl doesn’t like this guy and wants to remove him from the group or someone else wants to add their friend off their course that nobody’s ever met.

Eventually more and more groups are created and it becomes a sick game. Soon you’ll hear empty threats and pass-agg throwaway comments like: “Oh I’m not in that group but I don’t care she’s a bitch anyway”.

The problem with group chats is that what you type can be read in a totally different way to what was intended. Divides will be created, between houses, between friends. Paranoia will set in – that person never makes an effort to talk anymore, fuck it, kick them out of the group.

It’s the kind of thing that can be easily settled with a night to the pub, but in a group chat things are sinister and different.

When friends become more than just friends, WhatsApp becomes even more of a problem. Just last week two of our friends ended up spending the night together, (as always happens after a messy night at Fuzzy Ducks)

Unfortunately for the parties involved we went all news of the world on them and their secret encounter was no longer so secret… It was as though we were all part of this encounter discussing the intimate details, as though we were simply talking about a football game.

True, these things never stay secret for long at uni, but WhatsApp speeds up the process, making sure your bad decisions are broadcast and dissected for the world to see.

One of the worst things about all these group messages is the constant onslaught of unwanted shit about football or arguments over what colour that dress was. All of a sudden you check your phone after a lecture and it’s 86 unread messages – I don’t have the time for it and neither does anyone else.

And finally the unavoidable indirect messages and the bitchiness that comes with them. Sooner or later an iPhone gets passed around showing people what “she said in the group” and how “it was definitely a jab at me”.

Ultimately we were all better off in first year, knocking on each other’s doors to make plans and share gossip. If you’re already part of this vicious circle it’s too late for you, if you leave you’ll be aggressively asked “why?”, but for you lucky few avoid this tragic state of affairs at all costs.

Your WhatsApp ordeals

Harrison, second year Fine Art

“I’m on seven WhatsApp groups, constant messages buzzing through from different chats. Most of the time it’s all irrelevant. The chat I have with the lads is always shit chat and there’s no privacy”.

Theo, second year Politics

“I find WhatsApp really annoying when people go off on a massive tangent and I suppose everything that’s virtual you don’t have a tone of voice so you can say something and mean it in one way but it’s not always read like that”.