Is setting up a WhatsApp group making group working better? Is it the convenience to be able to read everyone's ideas and comments in an easy way?
Have you ever been in a situation where, in a conversation, you are in the minority, and while you try to explain your position, you end up awkwardly defending yourself?
Something similar happened to me recently when, in a meeting, I was saying that I am not in WhatsApp, and, therefore, I was unable to join any working chat group on that platform. The reason was simple: I do not own a personal smart phone, and I am not planning to have one any time soon. To be honest it is not that I have entirely ditched smartphones because at home I use one often for browsing news and also to talk with my family back home on, oops, WhatsApp.
Yet besides these two activities, I do not use any other app on a smart phone simply because first, I do not see any need to do so, and second, I think it is a waste of my time. You can call me "ancient", but I still believe that e-mails and text messages and phone calls are the most time-efficient tools available, especially the last one, phone calls, something that has become less andless popular.
Yet as you can deduct from my private digital life, I am a pragmatic, so in that meeting I was not at all blocking or discouraging the other members from setting up their own group on WhatsApp. After all, it can be useful if you know how to use it, but, all in all, for me, it would be an addition, another thing you have to take care of and definitely something I can live without extremely well.
Moreover, and most importantly, what for? In that meeting, my opposition (can I call it mild?) to new ways of communicating stems from practicalities, based on a pros and cons analysis, was met with disdain and almost contempt. To tell you the truth, my wariness is also somehow ideological, a sort of low-tech philosophy of life that I have embraced since young age when, at university, I was not using any type of mobile (at the time there were no smartphones...).
I started using one when, after completing my studies, I moved to Africa, where I was forced to use one for security reason. I had opposed the idea of being traceable at all times when I was a student, and I guess this is at least partially explained by my love for freedom and independence.
Also, a disclaimer: my intransigent spirit of freedom was enabled by the fact that at the time there was a ubiquity of public phones available on the streets, so it was, to some extent, an easy "game". Yet I do remember the peer pressure of my mates at the university, always complaining about the fact that I was hard to be reached.
Was I so? I am not entirely sure about it because, for one thing, when I had no mobile, I had to communicate very effectively when setting the next meeting or when dividing duties and responsibilities for some group work. In a way, that was harder to be found, and for me to find others was inevitably making me and my friends much better at communicating with each other. We were alsoending up planning better and, crucially, were better at committing better our resources, especially time availability.
Fast forward to the present, embracing technologies to communicate or live our lives is inevitable, but we have to know how to do it in a proper way. So, feel free to call me a pragmatic low tech, happy to hang around with its "stone age" mobile phone but also able to adapt when it's truly needed.
It means trying to remain faithful to my low-tech philosophy and mix it with some dose of realism and pragmatism. Perhaps, we abuse technologies like the e-mail, and we are tempted to replace it with other channels that, ultimately, tend to become as overbearing and as uncontrollable.
Is setting up a WhatsApp group making group working better? If it so, in which way? Less timespending on the e-mails? Is it the convenience to be able to read everyone's ideas and comments in an easy way? Maybe we just need to be flexible and adjust and be able to find some common-sense approaches to this conundrum.
Will you share the minutes of a meeting only on WhatsApp? Does it make sense? Is it practical and professional? I really doubt it, and I still believe that the e-mail should remain the main vehicle to communicate professionally, but probably we should balance it with a strong rediscovery of calling people directly.
Someone might try to fix a meeting by just relying on the e-mail when perhaps a phone call would do the job even if you might end up discovering "live" the undesirable possibility that your request got kindly denied. At the same time, receiving lots of e-mail is not too different from being swamped by lots of continuous messages on WhatsApp or continuously reacting to some social media postings. Ultimately it is about the way we use new technologies.
Another example.
Printed newspapers are not cool anymore, and, in all objectivity, news can be easily read on the smart phone even when there is no paywall. Yet how many youths are reading good, informative and useful contents on their mobile devices? As far as I understand, not many.
The issue is that social media did not prove great vectors in sharing factsbased news or quality commentary, and instead youths are bombarded by silly contents and stupid videos. It as if sharing and watching postings of sheer banality has become the most intelligent thing to do.
Being a pragmatic low tech means to be able to leverage new technologies when they really make your life and your work easier.
Technologies do not do the job (well AI might soon be able to change that), but generally we are the ones who should embrace technologies when and because they make our life better.
Going back to the initial story, I reluctantly but pragmatically agreed to use the home WhatsApp in the working group. So far it has not proved useful nor have people reacted to any of my messages. Are they reading but simply not replying because doing so is not cool or needed?
A version of this article appears in the print on April 7, 2023, of The Himalayan Times.