Always minus someone: WhatsApp’s side-chat/gossip – Yahoo News Malaysia

SEPTEMBER 15 — There is the official group: Family, office, old classmates who still pretend the Form 5 reunion is happening. Everyone is in it. Birthdays get a sticker. Political links get communally ridiculed. Lunch photos are shared. Blah blah blah. Then there is the other group which consists of the same people — minus one. Sometimes minus two. Given a name so bland it could pass as a logistics chat, and immediately put to its real use: Talking about the person who is not there. If this sounds familiar, congratulations. You have either built one of these groups, sat inside one, or — the more interesting fate — you are the missing name. The unofficial supplement WhatsApp facilitates and certainly did not invent: Gossip. It merely removed the last inconvenience. A brief history of gossip Once upon a time you needed a corridor, a kopi-o, a lowered voice. Now you need a few ticks, a contact list and hopefully people’s generally acquiescence with being involuntarily added to a group. But going even further back, gossip may have begun with hands; primates nurturing alliances by grooming: time-consuming, one-to-one, limited by how many backs you can scratch before sunset. Robin Dunbar’s
Read More