My neighbour – let’s call him John – is in a WhatsApp group with several of his former colleagues and friends. Like most such group chats, they share observations on current affairs and sport, the occasional meme, and comments on the ephemera of the moment. Last week, someone started a thread on that day’s drudgery, and the group’s participants began to outdo each other for the banal nature of the task in which they were engaged.
My neighbour’s offering was that he was on his hands and knees cleaning up his garage, rooting through the memorabilia of his life. The next message came from someone else in the group, and her contribution was of an altogether more sombre nature. “I’ve just been to visit my 88-year-old mother,” she wrote. “I couldn’t get an answer so I called the police and they broke down the door. We found my mother on the floor, having had a stroke. She was rushed to hospital and we don’t know whether she will survive.”
Before anyone could respond, John, pausing from his labours in the garage and not having seen this previous message, texted the following: “But on the plus side, I’ve found my bust of Arsene Wenger!” He accompanied this with a picture of his model of the former Arsenal manager.
As an expression of empathy, it lacked John’s customary sensitivity, but he quickly recognised his faux pas, and apologised profusely. There but for the grace of God go all of us on WhatsApp groups, and, in other circumstances, John might have lost friendships, his reputation or even his job, for such an infelicity.
While not quite on the scale of government officials revealing state secrets, my neighbour’s unwittingly embarrassing intervention, darkly funny though it undoubtedly is, provides another sobering story from the frontiers of modern communication.
The group chat has claimed more significant victims than my neighbour. Earlier this year, a Labour minister, Andrew Gwynne, was sacked for offensive comments he made on a group, having assumed it was a private conversation; then Donald Trump’s lieutenants shared details of an impending attack on Yemen firstly with a journalist they had mistakenly invited to their group and now reportedly the US Defence Secretary, Pete Hegseth, has done the same in a private group with family members; and only a few days ago the Conservative politician Robert Jenrick invited 600 Westminster insiders – MPs and journalists – to join a WhatsApp group, which was seen as a sign that he was preparing to make another run at the Tory leadership, and was reported as such. It turned out to be a call to sponsor him for the marathon.
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There will be many more such missteps, mistakes and misunderstandings to come, made public through the medium of WhatsApp groups. We of a certain age need to be especially careful, not being entirely conversant with the mores and conventions, or the vernacular, of our times.
The first advice I’d give my contemporaries about WhatsApp groups is simple: don’t. For a start, there’s the constant pinging of notifications (particularly annoying on residents’ or school parents’ groups). Then there is the transformation of a group that has a certain utility into one in which idiotic memes (that you are likely to have seen a hundred times already) are shared.
Also, it’s just not possible to appreciate the sensitivities of everyone on the group, so if you do have a joke, or some political commentary, to share, you always run the risk of offending someone, or, conversely, being offended yourself by someone else.
Make sure at least that you know the identity of everyone with whom you are sharing your thoughts. This is particularly pertinent if, for instance, you’re planning to attack Yemen any time soon. So, even if it’s deemed necessary to impart or receive information, try to stick to direct communication. None of us is too busy not to have time to copy and paste a text and send it to multiple users.
The 21st-century world of communication is fraught enough with dangers for those who were brought up in simpler, analogue times. Let the embarrassment of my neighbour John be a cautionary tale for all of us.
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