illustration of some family members sitting in front of a big phone screen filled with the rest of their family
Group chats put family life, along with their gossip and logistics, online (Image: Getty Images)

InternetAugust 27, 2022

The family that chats together stays together

Contributing writer
illustration of some family members sitting in front of a big phone screen filled with the rest of their family
Group chats put family life, along with their gossip and logistics, online (Image: Getty Images)

How on earth did families stay in touch before the invention of the group chat? Shanti Mathias celebrates the digital glue that keeps her tribe connected.

I was a teenager, sitting on the couch at a friend’s house, painting my fingernails sparkly blue while some inane entertainment – Brooklyn 99, brothers playing on the Wii – ran in the background. My friend was showing me photos of her family, updates from her cousins in Thailand, from her aunty in Colorado, and it was all part of something called a group chat. It was 2015. 

Maybe it was the Baader-Meinhof effect, maybe it was the fact that at that time smartphones were beginning to supplant email or Skype, but after that I started hearing about family chats all the time. My family and I lived in India; updates from my mum’s sisters in New Zealand percolated through a group chat they’d just formed. Other friends had Snapchat groups with their parents and siblings, or used Viber (remember Viber?) to hear from their loved ones who lived elsewhere. 

A few years later, when my sister and I moved out of home, we started a group chat for our immediate family. It’s gone through various iterations on Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp in the years since, and been joined by new chat groups for both sides of the extended family, and a group just for my siblings and me.

While not every family has a group chat – and data on this is hard to find – the ubiquity of smartphones means this way of staying in touch with family is increasingly common. Many social platforms and apps are built on the promise of messaging people, from WhatsApp and Messenger to Google Chat and Discord, but family group chats stand out from the ones we have with our flatmates, friends, colleagues or potential dates, in that they involve intergenerational communication. 

phone
Family group chats are another reason to stay attached to our phones Image: Getty/Archi Banal

There can be big differences in values, lifestyles, and personalities between the generations in a family, says Craig Fowler. He should know: the associate professor at Massey University specialises in how intergenerational communication shapes decisions and identities within family groups. While he hasn’t studied family group chats specifically, he sees the phenomenon as another example of how “family communication blunts the differences between [family members], building cohesion and showing them how they fit within this unit”. 

Of course, families have always communicated using the technology available to them, and the group chat is merely the latest iteration of this. “When I left home my mother expected me to sit down every Sunday and write her an aerogramme, just as she had done,” says Helen Beamish, a retired Dunedin resident with adult children. “When the letter arrived, I’m sure she’d tell everyone about what I was up to. My family group chat now is really the equivalent of the same thing.” 

Fowler – who grew up not sending aerogrammes, but writing a list of things to relay to grandparents on a weekly phone call – says technology has long been a “focal point” for family life. But does the convenience of a group chat mean that families hear more from each other than they would otherwise? 

Anya Kemp, a student who lives in Wellington, certainly thinks so. Her family started a Facebook Messenger group chat when she was in high school and gaining independence, but the activity within it really increased once she moved out of home a few years later. Now, her family communicates mostly in gifs and memes, “allowing the mundane or silly little updates we have throughout the day”.

four different phones with colourful overlpping text bubbles
In a family group chat, everyone gets a voice (Image: We Are/Getty)

Family group chats are great for logistics – airport pickups, school prize giving night, coordinating birthday presents – but they’re also lots of fun. Rose Newburn, a Dunedin mother and grandparent whose children range from age 26 to 39, has a family group chat on Slack, the platform better known for work communication. Newburn reads out some of their Slack channel names: “Christmas 2021, food, puzzles, photos, random, Rose in Wellington – that was for a visit the other week.” While the Slack group includes all of her children and their partners, she also has a separate Voxer chat with only her daughters. 

“Phone calls don’t work for everyone,” she says. “I found that [online] I could sometimes have more meaningful conversations with my kids about what they care about.” 

Forums like family group chats can reinforce family identities, Fowler says. Creating a group chat – and perhaps also a splinter group chat, just for some family members but not others – creates explicit boundaries about who belongs, and who knows what. There are things I’d tell my immediate family group chat, but not my extended family one; decisions that I’d discuss with my mother on a phone call but hope wouldn’t be broadcast in wider forums. 

Because where there are families, there is gossip. Kemp’s family group chat might include details of drama in her parents’ workplaces, Newburn’s Slack and Voxer conversations bubble with notifications about which children are considering buying houses and where, and Beamish realised she’d been talking behind her brother’s back when she accidentally left him out of a WhatsApp chat. 

letter, message, mail, post
Group chats: will the archive last like letters do?

But all three agree higher-stakes conversations would happen with or without their group chats. Kemp says she still likes phone calls with her parents, which allow for more substantial and private one-on-one conversations than the group chat, and allow logistical details to be sorted without the overwhelm of “notifications galore”. 

“I’m a chronic over communicator,” says Beamish, who has a group chat with her siblings, as well as with her husband and three children, some of whom have muted or left the chat. She doesn’t mind: she likes the daily photos and updates, but that’s just her. “I think everyone should know everything. With WhatsApp, I can get my needs met and they don’t have to look at it.”

There tend to be gendered patterns of family communication, which extend to group chats. Anecdotally, from the five or six family group chats I’m in and conversations with others, women seem to be more active in these forums. The sociological term for this is “kinkeeping”, Fowler says. “There’s usually a middle-aged female family member who is responsible for keeping tabs on everyone, organises reunions and makes sure everyone is included. Whether that is face-to-face or digital, it still falls on the female family members to do those things,” he says. 

And these patterns of communication will be preserved for the future. What would otherwise be lost to the mists of time – information relayed in person or over the phone disappearing due to forgetfulness, old letters or telegraph slips containing the salacious and the inane disintegrating in damp boxes – is instead perfectly crystallised in a group chat. If people remember their passwords and the big corporations who own these platforms continue to run their warehouses of servers stuffed, records of what people shared will remain. 

Fowler, who is definitely an optimist, sees this as a good thing, imagining future generations knowing more about the people they came from. “We’ll have these amazing archives of family exchanges,” he says. “They’ll be a wonderful resource.” I ask him about the ethics of corporations holding this data, to preserve or relinquish at will. His face falls. “It was so pure, and you’ve ruined it,” he says, laughing. 

Still, the group chat is an opportunity that hasn’t existed before, a consequence of the ability to share information being cheaper than ever before. Newburn, Beamish and Kemp appreciate their family chats, and intend to keep using them – and so do I. 

“There are obvious barriers of inequity [and] you might have to get past your family having views you disagree with,” says Fowler. But, he adds, with group chats and everything else technology affords, it’s also “a better time to be a family communicating than ever before”.

 

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a customised mug tshirt and cap mixed with an ancient archeology dig
What will the love of customising leave behind? (Image: Archi Banal)

InternetAugust 24, 2022

Our possessions make us as unique as everybody else

Contributing writer
a customised mug tshirt and cap mixed with an ancient archeology dig
What will the love of customising leave behind? (Image: Archi Banal)

In the age of mass production, being able to customise our objects is a seductive vision. But the urge to personalise is an old one, and it still relies on global economies of overconsumption.  

“It’s a very unique mug,” says the Cricut ambassador. 

She’s helping me imprint a Cricut mug with a Cricut Infusible Ink™ design so I can place it in the specially-designed Cricut Mug Press™. “Everyone loves being able to personalise their mug designs,” she says as she pushes the button to heat the machine. 

I hadn’t heard of Cricut, a company that sells machines that enable people to personalise a variety of items, until I was invited to a launch for some of their products being introduced to the New Zealand market. The room is filled with a variety of influencers and some local Cricut superfans who are customising tote bags, hats and mugs with cupcakes or the words “be kind”. With the Cricut Design Space app, which is required to activate the machines, anything can be customised, but you have to purchase from Cricut first. 

“Personalisation is not just a process, it’s also a feeling. Cricut has empowered people to share their love through personalised gifts while tapping into their creative side,” Nicola Dow Smith, Cricut’s regional director for Australia and New Zealand, tells me, in between helping other workshop attendees fuse designs to tote bags. She says that Cricut, an American company with a current market cap of $1.4 billion US dollars, “built the cutting machine category from the ground up.”

plastic machine with shiny paper is drawing on a piece of cardstock
A Cricut machine makes a card (Photo: Shanti Mathias)

The desire to express love through personalising is an old one, but I feel like I’m participating at its new frontier, even if I’m not very good at it. The cherry design I iron on to my hat (with a curved Cricut Hat Press™ iron) is askew; uneven placement gives my mug design an accidental ombre effect. The technology to realise my creative vision is there – but my results pale in comparison to the professionals. 

One of those is Teresa Kightley of online business The Custom Lab. Like many small business owners, Kightley uses Cricut tools to make custom products – cake toppers, keychains with named Spotify playlists, stickers and signs. Everything she makes, documented in Instagram Reels, looks immaculate. Kightley started her business while bored on maternity leave, watching videos of other people making custom products and realising it was something she could do herself. 

“As consumers, people want to stand out,” Kightley tells me. “They don’t want to just run into a shop and buy what is already there.” 

That Kightley can now work on her business full-time – and that Cricut products are more popular than ever – is an indication that, in an era of mass production, people still want objects made just for them. In the US, internet cool kids are customising tote bags with ironic phrases. Tools like “MomentumDash” christen your generic browser homepage with your name and an inspirational photo. A message from your friend might no longer arrive in their unique handwriting, but at least you can personalise the background of your WhatsApp chat and reply to them, your fingers tapping the glass screen, your other hand gripping your mass-produced phone case which you’ve adorned with specifically chosen stickers. 

“People develop and express their identities through the things they use,” says Tim Thomas, an associate professor of archaeology at the University of Otago. Businesses like Cricut sell their product with the promise of personalisation, but to the timescale of an archeologist, he says this is part of a longer story about how humans are entangled with the objects we use. 

Thousands of years ago, customisation might have looked like a stone tool shaped to fit the hand of the person who used it. Today, it might be someone adding shiny lettering to a mug with a machine. Thomas says that objects, like people, “have biographies” – they say something about the world they were made in. But objects also contribute to our biographies. 

“We’re completely caught in webs of material stuff,” says Thomas. In contemporary New Zealand, we relate to objects as human beings have always done, telling others about ourselves through what we own, making identities from the things we use and live with. But there’s a difference of scale: human beings in pre-capitalist economies made most objects themselves, or knew those who made them. 

In contrast, resource extraction, cheap labour, and a global economy mean that there are very few things in the contemporary household that haven’t been first touched, shaped, or made by other people – people we usually don’t know. “The degree of manufacturing has gone through the roof,” Thomas says. 

But there are universal, lasting ways that human beings relate to objects too, says Thomas. Anthropologists have long studied gift economies, how the exchange of objects creates and reinforces human relationships. That’s not in the past: traditions of gift giving at birthdays and Christmas are embedded in New Zealand culture, and many people who migrate here bring traditions of gift giving with them. “These objects are fraught with meaning about our relationship to each other,” he says. 

Tim thomas, a middle aged white man with a greying goatee, looks towards the camera with a small smile and a background of tapa cloth
Associate Professor Tim Thomas has made a career studying the way people of different cultures relate to objects (Photo: Supplied)

It’s something that Kightley has seen too. Many, if not most, of the items she personalises are intended as gifts. “People want something that means more,” she says: like generations of people before, there’s something to cherish about a unique object with your name on it. 

The question of personalisation is one of value, too. It would be cheaper to get the objects Kightley makes from Kmart, big retailers where the shelves are filled with things made elsewhere, cleanly stacked on shelves, everything identical and anonymous under the fluorescent lights. 

Kightley’s business pitches itself as an alternative to that: she packs her items by hand, adds a note. On Instagram, there is evidence of her labour, sparkling Reels where her hands take the generic – blank paper, plain plastic – and make the unique – bright cartoon stickers, matte acrylic signs. 

Adding a cupcake design to a mug is a small corner of the global economy (Photo: Shanti Mathias)

The massive success of Cricut is where capitalist production and the urge for the handmade and personal meet. At the workshop I attend, there’s something unsettling about decorating cheap objects from other places with designs I place with my own hand, as if the labour of ornamentation conceals what made the initially blank objects and materials so cheap. 

The customisation economy is not separate from mass manufacture, but enabled by it, the end point customer satisfying their creative urges while people oceans and borders away toil to form raw materials into saleable goods. Customisation can make it more tempting to overconsume, acquire things we don’t need – and once you own something customised, it’s particularly hard to get rid of. 

Still, investing an object with a sense of identity does present an alternative to the genericity of mass production. “It gives some control back, some choice,” says Kightley, who loves being able to realise her customers’ desires: she can make an idea in their heads a reality in their hands. 

Customised or not, what might future archeologists learn about us from the objects we’ve left behind? Thomas gives the example of blue jeans, ubiquitous from Manaus to Cairo to New Zealand: these objects left by the age of mass manufacture will tell a story about the interconnected global economy, not the identities of the individuals who owned them. 

But – as the selling power of personalisation reminds us – there are differences in how we relate to objects too. “The only way to understand [mass manufacture] will be through context,” Thomas says. In giving gifts and making objects our own, the desire to have and use things reiterates a central truth. “We can’t be social people without our objects.” 

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