Why are group chats so toxic?: A view from cognitive ecology

There is hardly any form of social media interaction more inflammatory and emotionally distressing than the so-called online group chats reportedly associated with such negative experiences as anxiety, hate speech, violence and even homicide. Adopting a cognitive ecolinguistic approach, we view an act of media use as a functional systemic unity between the media user's bodily “ways of meaning” and the affordable environmental resources on which she draws in these ways for meaning to emerge. As human ways of meaning are based on skillful enactment of mutually orientational behaviors across timescales, everything that a media user does is in and through language. The problem arises when such doings fail to be properly distinguished, namely, the two ontologically different and semiotically autonomous activities – those of text(ing) and talk – become enmeshed. We argue that the colloquial term ‘group chat’ is a complete misnomer for what (corpo)really happens in every act of media use because the user interacts with the digital technology rather than with the help of it. While natural group chat is a locally constrained and emplaced mutually orientational behavior, virtual group messaging is a technologically constrained realization of literacy skills by a media user who imagines/assumes the others to exist in a certain way and place. Semiotically, when we engage with the group via messaging, we are texting instead of talking. To think that we are talking through texting or that we are texting as if talking is a fallacy that results in a dysfunctional human-environment cognitive ecology. • As an ecological being, a media user draws on her cultural-technological environment to enlarge her participatory experiences beyond it. • As an operationally closed organism, a media user can only operate within her cognitive boundaries beyond which nothing exists. • Natural group chat is an observable coordination of co-present behaviors and situational resources. • Virtual group chat is an abstract totality of non-observable literacy-based technological practices at unspecified times and places. • In the semiotic reality of instant messaging neither group exists nor chatting happens.