Group Chat City

Running clubs are the new speakeasies

A bar I like in my neighborhood started a weekly running club in the spring and I finally checked it out last week. You could argue that this means I’m part of the running club fad that seems to be peaking, which is true enough, in the sense that a bar started a running club and then enticed me to show up by posting about it on Instagram. On the other hand, I’ve been running since I was a teenager and it has been clear to me all along that running, despite its many benefits, is not cool. If people think it is, something has gone wrong, or the definition of cool has been distorted (getting a good night’s sleep is not cool either—something can be a great idea without being cool.) This running club in my neighborhood had no apparent delusions along those lines, however. It was fun and I’ll probably go back.

Well, the running club’s season technically ended this week, so I basically missed the whole thing. But I got added to their group chat after our run, which is what I really needed, it turns out. The final run this week was rescheduled to a different time, and the group will continue meeting for “unofficial” runs the rest of the summer. All of this information flows through the group chat and nowhere else. If the running club, as advertised on the bar’s Instagram account—via a single post, the only way to know about it beyond word of mouth—consists of little more than a place, a weekly time, and the people who show up, then the reality is even flimsier: It’s just a bunch of people in a group chat coordinating their runs, and the group chat is named after a bar, the role of which is more symbolic than functional. My friend who came with me pointed out that the group chat and the running club itself are basically synonymous. The former, as much as the latter, is the source of conceptual unity that makes the arrangement more than the sum of its parts.

So much of what we see out in public is the visible imprint of a group chat, acting as both the connective tissue that holds it all together and the nervous system that animates it. This is both obvious and, suddenly, strange to me: that a familiar social form like a “club” might be better understood as a group chat with physical heft. What is the contemporary city, for that matter, but information crystallized into built form? A lot of that information—the social category, at least—flows through group chats.

THE GROUP CHAT AS SEWER SYSTEM

At this point, group chats are probably overtheorized. They are a seemingly irresistible object of cultural analysis and trend reporting, perhaps because they are so subliminal—the information layer just below the surface of daily experience, literal subtext, hidden in plain sight, begging to be brought into the foreground and discussed. Some of those group chat essays are more interesting than others, not surprisingly (the worst ones mostly just point out that we all use group chats a lot). Sophie Haigney wrote one of the better pieces earlier this year, articulating how group chats make us feel:

“The texture of my whole life experience is colored by the sense that I am talking to all my friends, all at once, almost all the time—or at the very least that I could be talking to them all, always, and that if I am not talking to them, then they are talking anyway, without me.”

She describes the wide range of purposes that group chats serve. Some are functional and ephemeral, taking shape around a social gathering, wedding, or trip before eventually dying out. “Some are more or less affinity groups,” Haigney writes. “I am in two separate chats for Grateful Dead enthusiasts, both of which tend to move at the pace of old-school internet forums.” Many group chats, of course, map to our actual social lives—sets and subsets of family and friends, in endless permutations. And then there are the activities: the running clubs, the fantasy football leagues, the book clubs, parent groups, and on and on. The work Slacks, the Discords, the Telegram groups…Basically, anything people do with one another, online and offline, is a valid reason for a group chat to exist.

Reading Haigney’s essay, it occurred to me that group chats have fulfilled Facebook’s original (and since failed) promise, albeit more haphazardly: Taken together, all your group chats amount to a relatively accurate digital mirror of your IRL social life and activities and interests. If you go a restaurant and glance at any table of three or more people, there’s a decent chance that they are in at least one group chat together. The same is reasonably likely for any social formation you encounter. Not only are group chats reflective of existing social arrangements, but the inverse is also true: A group chat can reify and solidify an otherwise diffuse group of people, as in my running club example above. Like the original incarnation of Facebook, the group chat as a digital form feels fundamentally optimistic—not restrictive but expansive and additive, as Haigney writes. “In the landscape of group chats, your social world tingles with life, in all directions, at all times, at your literal and proverbial fingertips.”