Before mobile phones, friendship was defined by long chats on the landline. You’d know your best friend’s number by heart, call whenever you fancied a chat and spend whole evenings gossiping down the receiver. Today, the prospect of an unexpected phone call from anyone is frankly rather alarming, and another technology has come to define modern friendship: the messaging app.
My experience of messaging is similar to that of most Millennials. It started with SMS on a pay-as-you-go Nokia 3510, where every message was carefully crafted to fit as many words into one text as possible, so as not to cost more credit. Everyone became an expert in ‘text speak’, eking as much out of the 160-character limit as possible so that evry msg lookd smthg lyk ths. Now, messaging is almost entirely conducted through smartphone apps such as WhatsApp and iMessage, which use Wi-Fi or cellular data instead of the SMS protocol, and which let you type a hell of a lot of emojis before getting anywhere near a character limit.
As if chatting one-on-one didn’t pose enough etiquette dilemmas, these apps have also introduced a way of communicating with entire friendship circles at once: the group chat. At their best, group chats can bring people together, connecting friends across time and distance and putting a 24-hour support group at your fingertips. At their worst, they can see you waking up to another 200+ notifications from that WhatsApp group you joined as part of a hen do six months ago and are now trapped in forever, fearing you’ll cause mortal offence should you leave.
In this chapter, we’ll look at messaging, the group chat, the phone call (gulp), and the digital etiquette of everyday conversation in these brave new media. Our friends may just be a couple of taps away, but while it’s never been easier to reach them, it can be harder than ever to say the right thing – to the point that we’ve even developed whole new ways of speaking (or writing) in order to get our messages across. Because nothing says ‘I love you, buddy’ like a perfectly timed gif.
THE MESSAGING APP
Messaging has become the de facto medium for chatting with friends because of its conversational nature. It’s faster and friendlier than email, and less intrusive than an unexpected phone call. More importantly, it’s instant (or about as close as you can get), which means it’s perfect for in-the-moment discussions, where fast responses mimic the immediacy of a face-to-face chat.
As such, the key to good messaging is the same as good conversation. You should be having a back-and-forth discussion, not delivering a monologue. Messages should be kept short – a couple of sentences at the most – and written off the cuff. An informal tone is not only acceptable but often required. As with email, if you have to stop and think about it too much before sending, you’re probably in the wrong place; maybe you should be talking in person.
Given the quick-fire nature of messaging, a key point of its etiquette is the prompt response. You might not necessarily have your phone on you at all times, but you’re bound to check it at least every few hours (and let’s not kid ourselves, it’s probably closer to every few minutes). Don’t leave a friend hanging. A fast response with the occasional typo will almost always be more appreciated than a witty reply delivered hours later.
MESSAGING APP HOROSCOPE: WHAT YOUR DEFAULT MESSENGER SAYS ABOUT YOU
You don’t overcomplicate things. You’re totally normal.
Facebook Messenger
You still actively update your Facebook status. You’re probably over 40.
Signal
Your friends describe you as smart, techy and a little paranoid. You like wearing black hoodies. Your favourite topic of discussion is telling everyone why you’re not on Facebook.
Snapchat
You’re still in full-time education. Selfies make up more than 50 per cent of the total number of pictures stored on your phone.
Instagram DMs
You’re also young, but you think that Snapchat was, like, sooo last year.
Twitter DMs
You work in media.
Something else
Well look at you, you quirky little cookie.
This is especially true if you are part-way through a conversation. You wouldn’t suddenly stop mid-way through talking to someone in real life, so don’t do it here either. There’s nothing worse than being in the middle of some juicy gossip and suddenly getting blanked, so that you’re compelled to keep checking your phone every 30 seconds just in case you didn’t hear it buzz. If you need to duck out of a chat before it’s come to its natural end, simply send a quick note saying as much, and resume the discussion when you’re able to.
There are dozens of messaging apps out there, most of which have very similar functionality, though they may emphasise different features or appeal to different demographics. Just make sure you join one that your friends actually use too, or it rather defeats the purpose. When I downloaded Snapchat in my late 20s, excited to share dog-filter selfies with all my contacts on the app, I was met with nothing but digital tumbleweed and a cruel reminder of the inexorable march of time.
READ RECEIPTS, OR THE INIMITABLE TORTURE OF BEING LEFT ON READ
If prompt replies are the first rule of messaging etiquette, leaving someone ‘on read’ represents the ultimate faux pas.
Read receipts, or the ‘seen function’, are the little signifiers that let you know someone has read your message. On Facebook Messenger, for instance, a little white circle with a blue tick means your message has been sent, a blue circle with a white tick means it’s been delivered, and a miniature icon of your recipient’s profile picture means it has been read. On WhatsApp, one grey tick means your message has been sent; two grey ticks mean your message has been received; and two blue ticks mean your message has been read. (Note that read receipts are different to delivery receipts, which only tell you your message has been delivered, not read.)
This mechanism is ostensibly a handy little feature to let you know when someone’s available to talk, but, more often than not, all it does is lead to that singular and exquisite agony: being left on read.
Being left on read – or, as it’s sometimes known, being ‘blue-ticked’ – is when you can see that someone has read your message, but they haven’t replied. You can witness the rejection before your very eyes. You send a message, you watch the little icons change colour, you see them turn to ‘read’ … and then, nothing. Those two little blue ticks are just left hanging. Your message has been read and ignored, deemed unworthy of response.
The anxiety, anger and shame that come with being left on read can be brutal. It’s not that the person hasn’t responded that hurts; it’s that you know they have chosen not to respond. Those little blue ticks cruelly strip you of the lies you could otherwise tell yourself as to why they’re not messaging back. Maybe they don’t have their phone on them, maybe they didn’t see the message, maybe they’re just too busy. You know they saw the message. You know they have their phone on them. You know they had time enough to open the message.
Of course, there’s usually a perfectly boring and reasonable explanation as to why someone hasn’t immediately responded to your message after reading. Perhaps they got distracted. Perhaps they don’t know the answer to a question you asked and plan to get back to you later. Perhaps they checked your message because they thought it might be something important, but actually you were just sharing a link to a funny YouTube video and really they have more important things to do right now, OK?
But these aren’t the explanations your brain entertains. Faced with those two little blue ticks of rejection, you can’t help but jump to the worst conclusions. Was it something I said? Something I didn’t say? Do they just hate me? They must hate me.
It’s not just you. Researchers who have studied behaviour on messaging apps have found that a lot of us get antsy about read receipts. Around 2012, when the seen function was first introduced on Facebook Messenger, researchers at the University of Mannheim set out to see what people’s expectations were around the feature. By surveying students, they found that people who felt a stronger need to belong and had a greater fear of ostracism felt more pressure to respond to ‘seen’ messages quickly, and expected their chat partners to respond quickly, too. People expected faster responses from chat partners they had a stronger relationship with, such as close friends, and also felt more obligation to respond quickly themselves when talking to these people.1 ‘The highest perceived obligation to answer, and the highest expectation for others, was romantic partners,’ says Rainer Freudenthaler, one of the authors of the study, which leads us to another pro tip: never leave your partner on read.
Over time, however, Freudenthaler reckons that people have got a bit more used to read receipts. He insists that it doesn’t make much difference to him these days. ‘Most people I know don’t really care if I answer late,’ he says. That’s what he thinks …
Given our general anxiety around being left on read, it’s good etiquette to respond to messages as soon as you’ve read them. If you don’t have time to give a full answer, send a quick message to say you’ll respond properly later. On many apps (though not all), you can choose to turn read receipts off. The problem is that, when you disable them so that people can’t see when you’ve read their messages, you also disable them so that you can’t see when they have read your messages. And when you know that all it takes to see if someone’s ignoring you or not is changing one little setting … well, if you’re able to keep them turned off for any extended period of time, you are a stronger person than I am.
Alternatively, there is a workaround: if you read your messages on your phone’s lock screen or notification panel without actually opening them, they don’t show up as read to the sender. Sneaky.
Last seen
As well as the two little blue ticks of betrayal, you can usually surmise that someone is flagrantly ignoring your messages by when they were ‘last seen’ or ‘active’. This displays the time someone last used the messaging app, so you can tell if they’re really still asleep or if they were happily chatting away to other (clearly more important) people just two minutes ago.
As with read receipts, you can usually turn your ‘last seen’ or ‘active’ function off – but then you also can’t see it for other people. On WhatsApp, you can still see when someone is ‘online’ regardless, meaning you know they have WhatsApp open and are connected to the internet. Of course, they could just be busy with other things and genuinely not have seen that you’re trying to get through. A likely story.
Is typing …
The second most distressing signifier in messaging, after read receipts, is the typing awareness indicator. This lets you know that someone is in the process of drafting a response. Sometimes, it looks like a little messaging bubble with an ellipsis in it. Sometimes, it pops up as ‘So-and-so is typing’.
The typing awareness indicator can be very useful; if you see someone else is writing a message, you know to wait and let them finish before you interrupt. The problem is that, as with read receipts, we tend to read way too much into it. This is a situation in which silence really does speak much louder than words: if you see someone typing for ages, you expect a long message. If all you get at the end is ‘OK’, or even no message at all, you can’t help but assume some kind of ulterior meaning. What did they really want to say?
Putting too much stock in the typing awareness indicator can also lead to the kind of farcical situation where one person notices the other is typing and so stops to let them go first, only for the other to notice they were also typing and so stop to let them go first, and so on – like when you get to a door at the same time as someone else and you both insist, ‘After you,’ ‘No no, after you,’ until you’re stuck in an interminable dance of politeness.
THE FIVE STAGES OF GRIEF AFTER BEING LEFT ON READ
Denial: Great, they’ve seen my message! I’m sure they’ll respond any moment now. Any moment now …
Anger: Bit rude, really.
Bargaining: Did I say something wrong?
Depression: I guess they must just hate me.
Acceptance: They are dead to me.
Try to have an idea of what you’re going to say before you start tapping, so you don’t end up in ‘typing …’ purgatory. Remember, messaging is meant to be informal and conversational; if you’re writing something that requires extensive editing, it’s probably time to put down the phone.
THE GROUP CHAT
Most messaging apps have a group chat function, so that you can have a conversation with multiple people at the same time. Friendship circles today are defined by the group chat: if you’re not in the chat, you’re not in the crew.
The group chat as we know it is a relatively new phenomenon. Although chat rooms existed aeons ago in internet terms, people generally used these to speak to strangers, not people they knew in real life. When I recently asked my friends from university how we used to communicate and organise group activities before we had a shared WhatsApp group, we struggled to remember. Did we really just text people individually? Did we knock on people’s doors unannounced? Did we … talk?
The thing is, it was simply impossible to have a sensible group discussion in a digital forum before people had smartphones. You’d have to get to your computer, check all the messages that had come since you last logged in, add your two cents, then wait for everyone else to get back to their computers to add their opinion. A ten-minute conversation could take days.
Now, it’s easy. Select a few contacts, come up with a witty name for whatever assortment of people you’re bringing together, and bam! You’re in yet another chat group.
There are generally three types of messaging groups: long-term groups for defined circles of friends, intermittent groups for people with shared interests, and short-term groups created for specific events. Looking through my WhatsApp right now, I’m currently in a staggering 79 group chats – although the vast majority of these are inactive. At the top are the ones I regularly interact with, consisting of various groups of close friends and family members. Then there are the hobby groups, used to organise semi-regular meet-ups: the book club group, the Mario Kart group, the two different pub quiz groups (sorry teams, I’m cheating on you). Then there’s a long list of groups dedicated to events gone by – festivals, weddings, New Year’s Eve parties. Several are simply called ‘Dinner’.
Group rules
Before you create a new group, make sure you’re not already in one that serves the same function. Things get confusing when you have seven different permutations of the same group of friends, and this can easily lead to crossed wires and misunderstandings. Everyone’s experienced that mortifying brain lapse where you accidentally send a message to the person you’re talking about instead of to – imagine doing that, but with a load of mutual friends also in the group to bear witness to your shame.
If you’re confident a new group is required, follow a few simple guidelines:
Be clear about what the group is for
Is this a general gossip group, or is it mainly functional? Choose a group name that communicates this, such as ‘Knitting Club Chit-Chat’ or ‘Knitting Club Meet-Up Admin’. People will be automatically notified when you add them to a group, but it’s good form to send an initial message to explain why you’re bringing people together.
Keep the group concise
Group chats are like email chains, in that the more people you add, the more unwieldy the message thread is likely to get. Adding too many people also makes a group feel less personal; a group chat of five close friends is much more intimate than a group chat of 15 people. Bear in mind also that when you add people into a group, their phone number will be visible to other group members, even if they don’t know them, so this carries a certain level of responsibility.
Facebook Messenger allows you to have 250 people in a group and WhatsApp 256, but the thought that anyone could have any kind of meaningful conversation with that many people at once seems preposterous. Keep it to a maximum of around 10 people for a discussion-style group, or 20 for an event group. If you need to add many more, consider a less immediate form of communication that won’t bombard everyone with notifications, such as a Facebook Event or a mass email (just make sure to follow the rules of CC).
Don’t leave people out
Although you want to keep group numbers limited, people’s feelings come first. No one likes to think they’re being excluded from the gang, or that everyone else is talking behind their back. If you’re making a group for everyone from knitting club, you do need to add everyone from knitting club, even if you all not-so-secretly think one person’s really annoying.
Introduce newcomers
If you’re adding people who don’t know each other into the same group, make a brief introduction, just as if you were playing host at a real-life meeting. This is particularly important if you are adding new people to an existing group, as new members will not be able to see any messages that were sent before they joined. Make a simple announcement to bring everyone up to speed, like, ‘Everyone, I’ve added Jan to the group – Jan, we were just talking about Jenny’s bobble hat pattern.’
The one group that I strongly maintain you don’t need is a work group. A group for friends from work? Sure. But leave the office chat to messengers designed specifically for business. Just think of it this way: in a group chat, you can only ever reply-all. (That, and it’s probably a good rule to never hold work conversations on the same platform you use to send nudes.)
ALL THE GROUP CHATS YOU’RE PROBABLY IN
The family group
Your mum’s discovered WhatsApp and adds you and your siblings to a group (she adds your dad too, but he never posts and you’re not sure he even knows what it is). Safe topics of conversation include: holidays, what you’re eating for dinner, and The Great British Bake Off. Things get more tense when the subject turns to as-yet-nonexistent grandchildren, career prospects, and isn’t Pamela from next door’s newly single son just lovely?
You and your siblings soon start a second group – without your parents.
Mum: A few photos from the first day of our cruise!!
Mum: [photo1]
Mum: [photo2]
Mum: [photo3]
Mum: [photo4]
Brother: Mum you know you can send more than one photo at once?
Mum: Oh! How do I do that?
Brother: Press the button with the plus sign on it when you go to add a photo
Mum: Like this?
Mum: [photo5]
Mum: [photo6]
Mum: [photo7]
Brother: No when you go to add a photo, press the plus sign
Mum: Do you mean a button on my phone?
Brother: No in the app
Mum: Do I need to download something?
Brother: Never mind
Mum: [photo8]
Mum: [photo9]
The passive-aggressive flatshare group
You’ve just moved in with your mates and you’re psyched. What could be better than living full-time with your besties? You start the flatshare chat group full of enthusiasm, and name it after an in-joke that only you guys will understand. It starts out cute: you let each other know when you’re going to be out, talk about a housewarming party that never actually happens, and ask if anyone wants anything from Tesco while you’re passing.
As the shine wears off, things start to change. The group tone gets chillier; messages are now mainly for function, not fun. Conversations almost always devolve into debates over the cleaning rota, with attempts to use emoji to soften your requests failing to hide the obvious passive aggression.
You start quietly saving up to move into your own place.
Flatmate 1: Hey guys, don’t want to be *that flatmate* but whose turn is it to clean the bathroom? It’s looking pretty gross :)
*
Flatmate 2: Who used the last of the milk without replacing it? Remember we agreed milk is a shared good, I don’t mind doing it this time but next time please replace it if you finish it ;)
*
Flatmate 3: Hi! Just to say can we stick to our agreed shower times please? Was nearly late for work <3
The neighbourhood watch group
This is like a flatshare group, except it includes everyone in your building or perhaps the whole street. What could possibly go wrong? You now know everything about your neighbours’ lives, even if you wouldn’t recognise them in person. Mary wants to start a gardening club; Joelle is trying to sell an old wardrobe; Howard is looking for a good divorce lawyer. But where the group really comes into its own is as a digital summit for your friendly neighbourhood curtain-twitchers and busybodies, who soon infest it with their Nimbyism and casual racism.
Neighbour 1: SUSPICIOUS MALE spotted outside!! See attached picture, I only got the back of his head though. About 6 foot, looks Asian. Could this be the person who damaged the communal flower pots three weeks ago?
Neighbour 2: Maybe!!! Have you called the police?
Neighbour 1: Yes I left a message.
Neighbour 2: Nice. Hopefully this time they will actually do their job!!!
*
Neighbour 3: Hello, can you please not report my dinner guests to the police in the future?
Neighbour 1: Calm down, Neighbour 3, let’s keep the group civil.
The music festival group
You’re going to a festival with a gang of mates and you make a group to organise car-shares and camping supplies, and share rumours on the line-up. Once you’ve got to the venue and pitched your tents, you split up to see different acts. Afterwards, you message the group chat to try to arrange to meet up again – forgetting that everyone else is trying to do the same thing, no one’s got any signal, and each message takes about 20 minutes to get through. You spend the rest of the evening like this:
Group 1: Hey! Meet at the tents in 20 minutes?
*
Group 2: Sure
*
Group 1: Oh sorry we already left – we’re at the dance stage, about level with the third speaker on the right, next to the guy dressed in a unicorn onesie
*
Group 2: Are you still there? Can’t see you …
*
Group 1: We’re back at the tents!
*
Group 2: We’re at the tents. Where are you?
*
Group 1: We just left the tents. Anyone seen Susie? We’ve lost her
*
Susie: I’m at the tents! Where is everyone?
The birthday party group
This is the inevitable group you find yourself added to any time someone’s trying to organise an event. The host sends out the initial invitation and the RSVPs start rolling in. A few days later, the host invites more people they forgot the first time round, and they have to re-send all of the details again. Repeat until the day of the event, at which point:
Host: Hi everyone, looking forward to seeing you all later today. Reminder that the address is 25B – ring the doorbell when you arrive
*
Guest 1: Hey! Was it 25A or 25B?
Host: 25B! Ring the bell when you get here
*
Guest 2: On our way! What’s the address again?
Host: 25B, ring the bell
Guest 2: Thanks :)
*
Guest 3: Hey! Anyone know the house number? And should we just ring the bell?
Optional: The lads’ group
Want the definition of toxic masculinity? Just take a look at a male-only group chat. Often pulled together around a stag do, the lads’ group is where even your wokest male friends become decidedly un-PC, all in the name of the group’s primary goal: banter. Sexist memes, poor-taste jokes and calling everyone a see-you-next-Tuesday is par for the course. One lad thinks it’s really funny to keep changing the name and icon of the group, always to something you’d be embarrassed to be caught looking at. Another just shares porn gifs, and no one wants to tell him to cut it out, for fear of looking less macho. The more progressive lads’ chats have finally got past the phase of using ‘gay’ as an insult, but they’re still coming to grips with the idea of transgender people.
Lad 1: Oioi lads guess what I did last night
Lad 2: What?
Lad 1: YOUR MUM
Lad 3: hahahaha classic
Lad 4: lol legend
Lad 5: [porn gif]
Lad 6: *changes the group name to ‘MILF Appreciation Society’*
GROUP CHAT ETIQUETTE
Now you’ve got your group on the go, and you’re happily chatting away. Unlike email, messaging is supposed to be fun – if you’re filled with dread when you get a notification, you’re doing friendship wrong. When you find yourself in 79 different chats at the same time, however, it can get a little overwhelming, and some basic etiquette will help keep things under control.
As with other forms of digital communication, timing is a major consideration in messaging etiquette. Be mindful of people’s schedules. While prompt replies are preferred, not everyone can keep tap-tapping on their phone throughout the working day, so try not to hold any major discussions or make group decisions when you know someone’s unavailable. In a group chat, a message won’t be marked as read until everyone has seen it. (For discreet work-hour gossiping, many messengers have a desktop version that you can conveniently hide behind a Word document when the boss walks past …)
Keep messages in a group chat relevant to everyone, otherwise you’re just clogging up people’s feeds – like the WhatsApp version of an unnecessary email CC. Start a separate group if you’re talking about an issue that not everyone is interested in, or if you’re planning an event that not everyone in the first group is attending. Don’t have a private chat in the group chat; that’s just rude.
Speaking of clogging people’s feeds, you should aim to minimise notifications. Don’t send six separate messages in a row when one longer one will do. Anyone who has their notifications turned on will wonder what’s possessed their phone when it starts non-stop buzzing, only to find out that it’s …
… just you
… writing one message
… a few words
… at a time.
A conversation requires more than one person, so try to keep the discussion balanced and make sure everyone has a chance to contribute. If you’re sending a lot more messages than you’re receiving, you may need to calm down a bit and give someone else a chance to speak. That said, no one likes a lurker; if you’re in a group, you should contribute at least occasionally. You don’t need to be a Chatty Cathy, but it’s kind of spooky if you stay silent and then chime in after everyone’s forgotten you’re there.
On a related note, don’t wait for everyone else to respond first, especially when it comes to group decision-making. There’s nothing more annoying than everyone waiting to see what everyone else thinks before giving their own opinion. If you have something to say, spit it (politely) out.
And can we all please agree one rule: If you propose an event or meeting, you must also suggest a time and location. There’s little more irritating than when someone asks, ‘Why don’t we go for dinner this weekend?’, receives a chorus of yeses, and then asks, ‘Great, where?’ This results in one of two things: radio silence, or a sudden influx of suggestions all across different parts of the city that happen to be convenient to the individual proposing them. The group becomes a standoff, with no one wanting to be the person who makes a decision. Take the initiative.
Finally, it is a law of messaging groups that what happens in the chat stays in the chat. Even if you’re talking to a large group of people, you can assume that their messages are not meant for other people’s eyes. Respect your friends’ privacy, and don’t share messages with others unless you have permission – even if you would get mad internet points if you put a screenshot on Twitter or Reddit. Resist the temptation to turn your friends into entertainment.
The art of the side chat
When you’re talking to a group and sneakily have a separate private conversation with one or more friends within that group at the same time – a subgroup, if you will – you’re engaging in a side chat. The ethics and etiquette here are rather fraught. Obviously, it’s usually very rude to talk behind someone’s back. That said, the side chat can be a godsend if you need to clarify something that’s been said in the group, or just blow off steam to a close friend when things get too crazy.
Be warned, though: the side chat is not for amateurs. Having two chats on the go about the same topic at the same time is perilous territory when it comes to finger slips. Get the chats mixed up and you’ll be sorry, as Labour MP Lucy Powell found out when she tried to send an angry message about some other MPs’ positions on childcare to a couple of friendly colleagues. She instead accidentally sent it to a WhatsApp group that contained every female Labour MP – including those she was complaining about. It’s more than likely that you too have experienced the sinking feeling when you’ve sent a message to the person you’re talking about, rather than the intended recipient.
When this happens – and it is probably when, not if – then you have a race on to hit the ‘delete’ button before people see it. Not fast enough, and your only option is a swift and full mea culpa. In Powell’s case, she soon noticed her error (although not soon enough) and apologised for ‘being a cow’.2
See what I mean now about not having a work WhatsApp group?
As if the side chat weren’t enough, I’m reliably informed that it’s a common phenomenon to take screenshots of a conversation you’re having with one annoying friend and share it with another in order to moan or laugh about it behind their back – like a side chat, but where the other person wasn’t even in the chat to begin with. This is particularly duplicitous because people have a certain expectation of privacy when it comes to one-on-one messaging conversations, and would probably feel somewhat betrayed to learn you’re secretly sharing their responses with someone else, much as you would if you heard your private conversation had been relayed to a third party.
It’s pretty hard to justify this behaviour – really it’s just pure bitchiness – so tread very carefully if you just can’t resist. It’s all too easy to accidentally screenshot a conversation and then send it back to the same friend – a dead giveaway you’re maybe not being quite as sincere or trustworthy as you’re trying to pretend.
Muting
If I had to choose one technology that has genuinely improved humanity’s lot, it would have to be the mute function, which you can find across a range of platforms and which can be heaven sent when it comes to your message notifications. Just think of all the friendships it must have saved and the sanity it must have preserved, and there’s probably a good case for whoever invented it to be handed a Nobel Peace Prize.
The mute setting in a messaging app turns off notifications for a conversation. You can still read all of the messages in the thread, but they won’t make your phone buzz and they won’t pop up on your screen one by one and distract you every three seconds. You can choose to turn off notifications for a set period of time, from hours to months, and other people in the group will not be alerted that you have muted the thread (although be warned: if you’re messaging people in the group separately too, they will probably put two and two together).
Muting means you can still participate in a group chat without getting so distracted by it, so you can respond at your leisure. It comes in particularly handy if you get added to an overly large group, or one that involves hashing out details of an event: you can simply RSVP, then hit mute and sit back in peace as everyone squabbles over dates and directions. It’s a way of bowing out of conversation without actually leaving, which can seem abrupt.
You need to be careful with muting a one-on-one conversation, as your lack of input is more likely to be noticed. There’s a fine line between muting and just blatantly ignoring.
Leaving
When muting isn’t enough, your only option is to leave the chat. If you leave, you won’t be able to receive or send messages in the group any longer and will only be able to join again if you are re-invited by an admin. You should only do it, therefore, if you’re absolutely certain you don’t want to be in the group any more – for example, if it was created for an event that has now passed.
Never leave a group in anger, or to make a statement. When you exit, remaining group members will be notified, and that ‘… has left the group’ message can look an awful lot like a petulant door-slam. You’ll be sorry when you have to come grovelling to the group admin to let you back in.
For this reason, if you do need to leave a group, it’s good manners to say goodbye first; just hitting ‘exit’ may be misinterpreted as an act of ghosting.
Blocking
If leaving a group chat is a last resort, then blocking is the nuclear option. If you block a contact, you will not receive any messages or calls from them. They will not be notified that you have blocked them, but they won’t be able to see when you are online and won’t see any updates to your profile. On WhatsApp, messages they send to you will appear with just one tick next to them, indicating that not only have they not been read, they’ve not even been delivered.
As blocking effectively eliminates contact, you should only use it if someone is really bothering you – like if they’re a spammer, or your ex. If you block someone who you are also in a group chat with, you will still be able to see each other’s messages in that group. It’s pretty obvious that you’ve blocked someone if they can see you’re active in a group chat but all their personal messages go undelivered.
QUIZ: MUTE, LEAVE, BLOCK
Forget snog, marry, avoid; when you’re only looking to avoid, these are your options. In the following scenarios, select whether you should mute the chat, leave the group, or block the person. Answers below.
1. Your best friend added you to a group ahead of their stag or hen do, and their random school friends are still going strong with the photos, jokes and memes. It’s getting tiresome, but your priority is not offending your bestie. Do you mute the chat, leave the group or block your friend?
2. You’re in a family WhatsApp group and your mum has discovered a newfound love of emoji. The constant influx of messages is driving you crazy. Mute, leave or block?
3. Your ex-boyfriend or -girlfriend with whom you had a rather dramatic breakup got your new number off a mutual friend and wants to ‘talk things over’. They’ve so far sent 12 messages and you haven’t replied once.
4. You love your main group chat with all your mates, but you’re having a rough day at work and need to focus. The constant messaging is getting distracting.
5. You’re added to a huge group ahead of an event in order to arrange travel and logistics. You’ve RSVPed, sorted your transport and are all set to go, but there’s still some time to go before the big day.
6. The big event is over, and everyone’s back home safely. You’re all still in the group, however …
7. You receive a message from someone you don’t know. Their profile picture shows a voluptuous, scantily clad woman and they send you a flirtatious message with a link they ask you to click on to see more sexy pics.
8. The talk in your main friendship circle’s group chat has turned to an upcoming event. You can’t make it, however, and you’re fed up of being reminded of what you’re missing out on.
9. You’re in a group with people who went to the same fitness class as you. But now you’ve moved away and joined a different class instead. You know you won’t see them again.
10. A person you met on Tinder a while ago occasionally sends you suggestive messages out of the blue. You thought you’d made it clear you’re not interested, but they won’t take the hint and their messages make you uncomfortable.
Answers: 1. mute, 2. mute, 3. block, 4. mute, 5. mute, 6. leave, 7. block, 8. mute, 9. leave, 10. block.
PHOTO AND VIDEO MESSAGES
Gone are the days when text messaging was limited to text; now, photos, videos and gifs allow for a smorgasbord of digital expression.
But just because it’s an all-you-can-eat buffet doesn’t mean you need to fill your plate. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but a thousand pictures are just annoying. Be selective; send one or two photos rather than a whole reel. If you’re sending multiple images, send them as one package rather than individually, so as not to clog the chat feed. Keep videos short, so that they don’t take a long time to download or view. No one wants to watch your fuzzy gig videos.
Photos and videos shared in a message are more personal than those put on public social media channels. It’s fine to share a few holiday snaps, but the best photo messages are those that make your friends feel like a real part of your life. Friends don’t want to see your perfectly-posed Instagram beach bod, they want to see your candid ugly selfie.
On apps like Snapchat, messaging is done almost entirely through photos and videos. Here, reciprocity is the rule; if someone snaps you, you’re expected to snap back. If you exchange snaps with a friend every day for three days or more, you’ll start a ‘Snapstreak’, which means a fire emoji will appear next to your friend’s name in your contacts list, with the number of days the streak has been going for counted down next to it. If you fail to snap each other over one 24-hour period, you will lose your streak and have to start again. Needless to say, friends don’t let friends’ Snapstreaks die.
Voice messages
Some messengers allow you to record short voice memos instead of typing a message. This feature can be very useful for people who find text messaging difficult, for example if you have poor eyesight or another condition that means you struggle to type on the phone keyboard. Some people also find voice memos more convenient if they’re messaging while doing something and don’t have their hands free. And some people just love to hear the sound of their own voice.
Used properly, voice memos can add that extra special something that a text message just can’t capture. Used improperly, all they add is that extra special annoyance.
A voice message might be more convenient for you, but it probably isn’t for your friends. As most of us read a lot faster than we speak, it almost always takes longer to listen to a voice memo than to glean the same information from a text message.
Keep them short – ideally under a minute. Messaging should be conversational, but voice memos soon become monologues. No one wants to have to pause their favourite podcast at a crucial moment just to listen to your 15-minute debrief about last night’s Tinder date before they can rejoin the conversation. Never send multiple voice memos in a row. If your finger slips off the record button before you’re finished, your message is too long.
If you have a good story to tell that just can’t be adequately conveyed by text, set up a phone call or save it for a face-to-face conversation. You need to keep something for real life.
Phone calls
OK, let’s get one thing clear: do not call unannounced unless someone’s dying.
In fact, even then, send a text first.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for phone calls. A voice call is much closer to a face-to-face chat than messaging and is therefore much more personal. You know the person on the other end is engaged right at that moment – there’s no blue-ticking here – so it’s perfect both if you want a snappy answer or a proper chat. A phone call also benefits from added tone of voice, which can still communicate emotion a lot better than even the most carefully selected emoji.
It’s for these same reasons, however, that phone calls are much more inconvenient. You need to give the conversation your relatively undivided attention for the duration; you can’t choose to respond later. Calling out of the blue can therefore put people out, especially if you plan to speak for more than a couple of minutes. Send a message first to check it’s a good time. If it’s not, arrange a time that is. If your call is urgent, send a message saying as much. This at least gives the other person a chance to clear any immediate obligations and mentally prepare themselves.
When you are on a call, make sure you’re in the moment. That gentle tapping sound in the background is a clear indication that you’re actually scrolling round the internet instead of properly listening …
Voicemails
There is literally no good reason to ever leave a voicemail, in a personal context as much as a work context.
Voicemails are the most annoying, time-wasting thing. You get the notification – You have one. New. Message – and then have to go through the rigmarole of dialing your answerphone, going through the robot-voice menu – To listen to your messages, press 1 – and listening to the message before you even know what it’s about. (Incidentally, you’ll almost always assume it’s bad news, which adds to the feeling of dread.) Then the message turns out to be a 30-second clip of your mother saying that she’s ‘just checking in, don’t worry there’s nothing important, just thought we hadn’t had a chat in a while, don’t feel you have to ring me back immediately, maybe we can talk one evening this week, hope you’re well, I’m sure you’re out somewhere having fun, OK, bye bye, talk soon, bye bye, call me back, bye.’
End of messages. To listen to the message again, press 1 …
If you try to call someone and can’t get through, hang up and send a text message instead.
Video calls
Video calls, the kind you make through Skype or FaceTime, are the closest technological solution you can get to speaking to someone in person. Not only can they hear you, they can also see you, with all your facial expressions and gestures displayed in beautiful, glitchy technicolour. A video call is perfect for letting the grandparents chat to their grandkids, staying in touch with a friend from back home, or keeping a long-distance relationship aflame.
But it’s also hard work. A video call demands full attention, even more so than a phone call, monopolising both your eyes and ears. It’s therefore even more important to schedule a video call in advance. When you do so, make sure to specify that it will be a video call, so your conversation partner doesn’t accidentally pick up when they’re half-naked or picking their nose. If you haven’t agreed on video, start with a voice call and then ask if they are happy to switch.
When you’re on a video call, try to avoid the temptation of staring at your own face and keep your attention on the person you’re talking to. Remember, you’re not taking a selfie. Don’t get too close to the camera; no one wants to find themselves talking to your nose hair. If the picture starts to lag or lose quality, you may want to switch to a voice call, as pixelated images and out-of-sync video are very distracting.
DECODING DIGITAL CONVERSATIONS
Now we’ve covered the essentials of good messaging behaviour, we’re faced with the question of what – and how – to write. Messaging is an informal medium, so a conversational manner, slang vocabulary and the occasional autocomplete mistake are all perfectly accepted and expected. These are supposed to be your friends, after all.
That said, as with other forms of written communication, it can sometimes be difficult to get your true meaning across when you’re limited to a keyboard and don’t have the benefit of non-verbal cues such as facial expressions and tone of voice. How can you show when you’re being sarcastic? Did your friend mean that comment as a joke or an insult? Is that ‘OK’ enthusiastic or begrudging?
Fear not, because thanks to the delightful flexibility of language and the creativity of human communication, we’ve come up with a whole range of creative ways to make sure our messages are correctly interpreted.
Emoji
One linguistic flourish that has come to define digital communication among friends is emoji. The smartphone’s upgrade to emoticons – remember those? :-) – emoji offer a cute, informal way to convey a simple idea or to add a bit of extra emotional context to a message. Often, emoji are used as a shorthand for expressing sentiment. Want to show you’re happy about something? Use the smiley emoji. Say congratulations? The clinking champagne glass.
Linda Kaye, a senior lecturer in psychology at Edge Hill University, says that emoji can be broadly split into two camps: facial emoji and object emoji. Facial emoji are the little smiles and frowns that convey facial expressions, and object emoji are all the others – the animals, flowers, food, flags and various train-like vehicles included just in case you really need to distinguish between a tram, trolley bus and light railway, plus those Japanese ones you’re not quite sure about (half a potato? Some kind of biscuit?).
Facial emoji are the most commonly used. Kaye says that these are usually used to add an emotional element to written communication or to help reduce ambiguity around a message, such as signalling to a recipient that a message is meant sarcastically. ‘It’s something known as hypertextual communication – this idea that we’ve compensated for the lack of non-verbal cues by using emoji and other techniques,’ she explains.
Kaye and her colleagues have studied how basic facial emoji change people’s understanding of a text. Their research on this is currently under review, but they provisionally found that when people were given the same text, they were significantly more likely to view it as more positive when it had a smiley emoji attached and negative when it had a frowny emoji. When an ambiguous emoji was attached – the face with eyes but no mouth – people were much less confident in their rating. These findings may sound rather obvious, but they show that emoji aren’t just silly little doodles and can actually be a useful tool to make sure your message isn’t taken the wrong way.
Emoji can also reveal something about the person using them. Looking at people’s use of emoji on Facebook, Kaye and her colleagues found that people judged those who used happy emoji as more open, agreeable and conscientious. They also found that people who used a more diverse range of emoji, and not just the happy faces, were more open-minded.3
If speaking to someone you don’t know well, you probably want to limit yourself to the most common emoji; not everyone is emoji-fluent, and once you get past the first screen in the emoji keyboard, they can get a little confusing. If people are struggling to tell the difference between a teardrop and a bead of sweat, they’re probably not appreciating the full sense of your message (are you sad? Anxious? Just been jogging?).
Kaye says she most commonly uses the ‘face with tears of joy’ emoji – which Apple said in 2017 was the most frequently used emoji on its platforms4 – and the winking face, which she uses to indicate sarcasm. ‘A lot of it is to do with the person and what kind of impression you want to give of yourself,’ she says. ‘I’m quite cheeky sometimes, so I quite like to just put them on to show a bit about me.’
A note on emoji skin tone
In 2015, the Unicode Consortium – the body that approves new emoji, as well as overseeing other character standards – introduced more racial diversity into the standard emoji set. The default emoji colour remains bright yellow (which is intended as a non-human shade), but users can now also choose from five different skin tones.
Most people choose either the default yellow or the emoji they feel best represents them. If you are white, however, it’s best to always stick to yellow. Using the lightest skin tone can come off as a bit, well, white power, while using a brown or black emoji when it doesn’t reflect your real-world identity is controversial: some suggest it can be interpreted as an expression of solidarity, but others argue that it’s tantamount to digital blackface. Of course, using the ‘default’ shade as white is problematic in itself, but for now it’s the best of a bunch of imperfect options.
Object emoji
Philip Seargeant, a lecturer in applied linguistics at the Open University, says that people use object emoji differently to facial emoji, and often in very creative, idiosyncratic ways. Different communities adopt emoji in different ways and imbue them with new significance. His friends, for example, have a WhatsApp group where they discuss politics. Whenever someone agrees with a point, they send an owl emoji – their own version of a ‘like’ button. ‘I’m not quite sure why, but that’s what they do,’ he says. These little quirks and in-jokes are the glue that hold friendship groups together.
Some emoji have also taken on more general second meanings. Beyond the euphemistic emoji covered in Chapter 2, several other characters have taken on special significance in everyday conversation. The nail polish emoji, for instance, expresses a sense of girl-power-style accomplishment, while the woman with one hand raised (officially supposed to represent an ‘information desk person’) indicates a sassy attitude. The upside-down face is often used to show sarcasm.
Be aware, however, that not all emoji appear identically across platforms. Different operating systems and apps can offer slightly different versions of the same emoji, which means things occasionally get lost in translation. The Apple dancer emoji might look like a fierce party girl, but her Samsung sister has more of a dad-dancing vibe.
The Emojipedia website is a good resource for looking up what an emoji means and how it appears across all different platforms. Meanwhile, if you’re dealing with a situation that requires particular care or nuance, you’re probably best sticking to good old-fashioned words. In 2016, pop legend Cher had to publicly apologise after tweeting in support of victims of a terror attack in Turkey – using a bomb emoji. She acknowledged that the emoji was ‘poorly placed’ and ‘insensitively timed’. Quite.
Emoticons
While emoji have largely superseded emoticons, the old-school smileys still have their charms :) Japanese emoticons, or kaomoji, can be particularly expressive; somehow emoji can’t quite communicate the depth of sentiment captured in my personal favourites, the shruggie: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and the table flip: (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
Given these borrow Japanese characters, they’re pretty cumbersome to type; your best bet is to just google, copy and paste. Or if you’re a habitual shrugger, you can of course set up a shortcut to type it with ease.
Gifs
Gifs (pronounced with a hard ‘g’, thank you) are animated images that last just a couple of seconds long. They can consist of cartoons or snippets of films, TV shows, or other videos. You can find huge repositories of gifs on sites such as Giphy.com, and many messaging apps have a gif search function directly in the app, which lets you type in a word and find related gifs. In WhatsApp, this is located next to the emoji keyboard.
In the context of messaging, the most common type of gif is a ‘reaction gif’. These are gifs that portray an emotional response to something that has been said – like the emoji’s bigger, animated cousin. They usually consist of a film or TV character’s facial expression. Fed up? Try an over-the-top eye roll courtesy of actress Krysten Ritter in the TV show Don’t Trust the B---- in Apartment 23. Confused? Winona Ryder’s puzzled expression at the Screen Actors Guild Awards has you covered. Shocked? One of my favourites is a gif of a snowy owl with its beak opening, slowly turning its head as if in disbelief.
You can also make your own gifs using online tools such as Giphy Gif Maker or Imgur’s Video to Gif tool. These sites let you drop in the URL of a YouTube video or upload your own video file and select a few seconds to turn into a gif that you can then drop into your chat or on social media as a bespoke touch.
How to laugh online
It seems to be a rule that emotions must be exaggerated in text. You can’t simply laugh at something, you must laugh out loud, or roll on the floor laughing. You must laugh so hard you’re crying, even if in reality your facial muscles haven’t so much as twitched.
Although ‘LOL’ is still in regular usage, it’s much less common than other forms of digital laughter these days. According to a Facebook report in 2015, laughing emoji like the ‘tears of joy’ face featured in around a third of people’s attempts at communicating laughter, while ‘LOL’ made up only 2 per cent. The most common form of laughter, however, was variations on ‘haha’, which made up just over half of total laughs analysed. The remaining 13 per cent of digital laughs were by those creeps who say ‘hehe’ instead.5
GRAMMAR AND PUNCTUATION
Emoji and gifs aren’t the only way of adding a shot of emotion or a dash of tone to a message. When it comes to text-based communications, we’ve become incredibly resourceful at finding ways to show what we really mean using just the characters and grammar already available to us.
Messaging is fast and casual, so it’s quite normal to be pretty lax about grammar and punctuation. In fact, a message that uses ‘proper’ grammar, with punctuation marks, capitalisation and so on, risks looking cold or officious. You’re supposed to be chatting to your mates here, not delivering a lecture; insist on using semi-colons in all of your WhatsApp chats and you’ll probably come across as the kind of irritating smartarse who comments on strangers’ social media posts just to correct their language.
Full stops
Only old people or troubled souls put full stops at the end of every message. It’s true: in 2016, even the New York Times reported that the once-imperative punctuation mark was dying, or at least ‘going out of style’. The piece quoted eminent British linguist David Crystal as saying that, ‘We are at a momentous moment in the history of the full stop’ – all because of instant messaging.
The thing is, in a messaging conversation, a full stop is simply not necessary. It’s clear when you’ve finished your thought already, so what function does the full stop fulfil? As a result, using a full stop in messaging now looks rather emphatic, and can come across as if you’re quite cross or annoyed. There’s something so final about it. ‘It looks as if you’re making a point,’ Seargeant observes.
Consider this perfectly normal response from a perfectly normal person:
– So I’ll see you later?
– OK
Now compare to this spine-chilling exchange with a probable axe-murderer:
– So I’ll see you later?
– OK.
OK. OK … what? Did I do something wrong? Are you mad at me?
While full stops at the end of sentences might be on a downwards slope, they can find themselves redistributed elsewhere, where they can be placed very deliberately in order to add emphasis. Take, for example, the trend of wedging one between every word for dramatic effect. Just. Look. How. Emphatic. This. Is.
Capital letters
It’s not unusual to drop capitalisation at the beginning of a sentence in messaging, even going so far as to use the lowercase first-person pronoun ‘i’. Sometimes, this is down to speed; sometimes, it’s a deliberate choice to emphasise the informal or lighthearted nature of a message.
Writing in all-caps, meanwhile, is generally understood to mean that YOU ARE SHOUTING.
Capitalising the first letter of words or phrases that aren’t normally capitalised in English can be used for ironic effect, to sarcastically suggest that something is a Matter of Great Importance, or to draw attention to a Tiresome Stereotype or Trope (see: the Nice Guy).
Question marks
The question mark is another victim of messaging laziness. Like the full stop, it’s simply not needed a lot of the time. It’s often obvious when a question is a question, and so the mark becomes redundant.
– Hey, how are you
gets the point across just as effectively as:
– Hey, how are you?
Sometimes, people deliberately leave question marks off in order to indicate that a question is rhetorical, sarcastic, or intended in a deadpan tone. See:
– What is actually wrong with you?
which sounds really rather accusatory, versus:
– what is actually wrong with you
in which you can almost see the speaker knowingly smiling and shaking their head.
Exclamation marks
British fantasy author Terry Pratchett held that using multiple exclamation marks in a row was a sign of certain insanity, proclaiming through one of his characters in his Discworld novel Maskerade that using five exclamation marks was ‘a sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head’. He clearly wasn’t in a WhatsApp group with any of my friends.
Unlike the full stop and question mark, the exclamation mark runs no risk of dying out; on the contrary, it has become perfectly normal to use many more than the standard single one. As a general rule, the more exclamation marks you use, the more excited you are!!! (Although to be fair to Pratchett, more than five does start getting a bit ridiculous!!!!)
An exclamation mark can even be a complete sentence. It suggests a reaction of shock or excitement, acting as a shorthand for ‘Wow!’ or ‘What?!’ or ‘How exciting!’
– I got the job!
– !
– !!!
Ellipses
Ellipses – indicating a pause … uncertainty … or that there’s more to come … – are used more frequently in messaging than in formal writing. You can use an ellipsis in place of a spoken pause or slow voice, to suggest a dramatic pause or hesitation. It’s not uncommon to shorten the three-dot ellipsis to two dots.
Used at the end of a message, an ellipsis either means the person hasn’t finished and there’s more to come (look to the typing indicator for a clue), that they are trailing off into deep thought, or that they would like some input from their conversation partner.
Grammar traditionalists, look away now, but you might even witness some people using the nascent ‘comma-ellipsis’ – an ellipsis made of two or three commas instead of full stops. This is by no means widely used, and only ever in a very informal context , , ,
The nuances of the comma ellipsis have not yet been codified, but a call-out to my Twitter followers garnered several potential explanations, with some people suggesting that it indicates irony or is meant as a less ‘serious’ version of the regular ellipsis, which to some people apparently looks a bit angry these days …
Or, of course, it might just indicate that someone’s finger slipped on the keyboard.
Text formatting
In some messaging apps, you can use the following codes to format text for extra emphasis:
*text* – bold
_text_ – italic
~text~ – strikethrough
On platforms that don’t automatically change these marks into formatting, they can be placed around words to give them a different meaning. A pair of asterisks around a word can indicate emphasis, but is also sometimes used to describe an action, like a sort of digital stage direction.
– Finally got home from work *sigh*
Used sparingly, these can be fun, but things get a bit weird when you start role-playing whole scenes. Leave that to the odd guys trying to act out their fantasies over Tinder *tips fedora*.
You can use a sole asterisk to indicate a correction to a preceding statement, as in:
– The party starts at 6pm
– *7pm
A pair of tildes around a word generally suggests that something is ~quirky~. This can also be used in a ~mocking~ way, like a punctuation eye-roll. Tildes combined with asterisks, sometimes referred to as ~*~sparkly unicorn punctuation~*~, was a trademark of teenage girls and emo kids back in the early noughties.
There are a couple of other formatting tricks you can use to add a bit of emotional oomph to your words too, such as spacing them out to show that you’re speaking slowly or being very deliberate with your word choice. You can also add exxxxxtra letters for emphasis, or to suggest a kind of draaaawl.
The secret vocabularies of friendship groups
Fifteen years ago, Philip Seargeant says, people used to talk about ‘netspeak’ or ‘internet English’ as if it were a distinct dialect. But it’s impossible to draw such a clear set of rules, as each online community tends to have its own linguistic quirks and adopt its own slang and jargon. ‘We’ve got to the point where there are so many different types of online platforms that just talking about “online” as a thing is no longer really helpful,’ he says.
Often, one community’s slang can appear completely unintelligible to outsiders. Take parenting site Mumsnet, which has its own dictionary of acronyms. Here, a member’s family is referred to by terms like DH, DW, DS and DD – meaning ‘darling/dear husband’, ‘darling/dear wife’, ‘darling/dear son’, ‘darling/dear daughter’, and so on. Not everyone gets the ‘darling/dear’ treatment – you’ll quite often see a MIL (mother-in-law) or FIL (father-in-law) without the D prefix, and then there’s the STBXH (‘soon-to-be-ex-husband’).
Things get particularly tricky when different communities use the same terms to mean completely different things. On Mumsnet, BC does not refer to two thousand years ago, but to the era ‘before children’. And a boyfriend isn’t a BF, as on many other forums – that acronym is reserved for ‘breastfeeding’. Instead, they’re a DP – which stands for ‘darling/dear partner’, but which, in seedier corners of the internet, means something rather more NSFW.
Common acronyms
There is, however, some digital vocabulary that has become widely adopted across different groups. While text speak, sometimes known rather gloriously as ‘disemvowelling’, has generally gone out of fashion, some of the acronyms it ushered in have fared better. Many are no longer common – remember when ‘LOL’ meant ‘lots of love’ instead of ‘laughing out loud’? – but others have stuck around. It’s increasingly common to see them written in lowercase rather than all-caps.
20 COMMON ACRONYMS
AFAIK – as far as I know
BTW – by the way
FTW – for the win
FWIW – for what it’s worth
FYI – for your information
ICYMI – in case you missed it
IDK – I don’t know
IIRC – if I recall correctly
IKR – I know, right?
IMO/IMHO – in my (humble) opinion
IRL – in real life
JK – just kidding
LOL – laugh out loud
LMK – let me know
NP – no problem
OMG – oh my god
SMH – shaking my head (in disbelief/disapproval)
TBF – to be fair
TBH – to be honest
WTF/WTAF – what the (actual) fuck (also WTH – what the hell)
SMARTPHONE ETIQUETTE
Finally, when it comes to friendship, it’s important to make sure digital communication isn’t overshadowing your real-world interactions. Debrett’s states firmly that ‘answering phone calls, texting, or even repeatedly glancing at the screen in a social situation is never acceptable’, but this seems a little estranged from the realities of modern life. It’s certainly true that you should always prioritise living, breathing company over the people in your phone, but light smartphone usage is these days generally accepted in casual social environments.
Still, you should keep distraction to a minimum. It’s fine to send the occasional message or take the odd photo, but it’s not OK to spend 15 minutes gawping at Twitter while others chat around you. Play it by ear; if you’re the only one with your phone out, put it away. You should at least avoid using smartphones at the dinner table (after you’ve Instagrammed your meal, of course).
SMARTPHONE BODY
LANGUAGE DECODER
Glancing repeatedly at phone – I’m busy, can we wrap this up?
Absent-mindedly scrolling through social media – I’m bored.
Staring fastidiously at screen and not looking up – Don’t talk to me.
Wearing headphones – Do. Not. Talk. To. Me.
The rules are a bit stricter if you’re having a one-on-one conversation with someone, as in this case being on your phone means you’re definitively ignoring a real-life friend, which is rude regardless. This is sometimes rather clumsily referred to as ‘phubbing’ – snubbing someone in favour of your phone. Think of it like leaving someone on read, except they can see with their own eyes that you’re texting someone else instead.
Looking repeatedly at your phone has replaced glancing at your watch as the universal sign of ‘I’m bored or busy or just really want to be somewhere else.’ If you notice a friend doing this, it may be your cue to slurp down the rest of your coffee and wrap things up.