Group Chat
It was my dear friend Faizās birthday over the weekend and afterwards I was browsing through our friend groupās WhatsApp chat, reading the lovely messages and looking at the photos from the night. I scrolled a bit further back and started thinking about how these group chats act as a form of collective micro-publishing. Iām in a few of these overlapping groups within which I/we share different levels of intimacy with different people, and the measure of intimacy could be applied to the groups themselves, directing what gets posted where. These are primarily spaces of affect and conversation, but also spaces to share something āpubliclyā. Itās interesting to think about what we consider private and what we consider public, what is the threshold at this scale?
This is also important to consider in the groups Iām part of on a different app, Signal. These Signal chats are a form of micro-organizing, intrinsically consisting of differing layers of trust and vetting. Groups grow and shrink and subdivide. With security being the primary concern, each of these groups have different roles in terms of sharing and collecting information, discussing and deciding on political tactics, coordinating actions.
Iām feeling curious about the slippages in these spaces (eg. the warm jokes and affect on Signal), where and with whom they overlap. Who are my friends and who are my comrades and what might the relationship be between these forms of (micro-) publishing and (micro-) organizing.