Group thinking

Re: The implicit trust and unfiltered candour of the group chat, Calum Marsh, June 16

I use the telephone, emails, face-to-face conversations, and even the postal service, to correspond with friends and relatives and conduct some business, but nothing that Calum Marsh describes about the uses and functions of group-chatting makes me interested in utilizing that form of “correspondence.”

As an academic, educator, and writer I believe that words do very much matter and that they should be used in measured, precise, and careful ways as a means of not only clarifying thoughts and issues but also facilitating greater understanding about and between ourselves.

I get the supposed therapeutic functions and outcomes inherent to participating in group chats and I recognize that for some people participating in this process satisfies their need for belonging to something, but overall what Marsh has described seems to me to be a description of a context that simply adds more to the cacophony of irrelevant and unproductive noise that surrounds us than an opportunity to reduce that noise to levels where we can make our correspondences more useful, meaningful, and more indicative of how intelligent we can be.

There are some positive aspects that can be attributed to the use of social media but, as a number of very wise people have warned, the sheer weight of the inane and banal “correspondences” that flood these services tends to lower everything connected to them to a general state of lowest-common denominator, thus subsuming or annihilating their potential to help make the world a more informed and thus smarter place to live in.

There are First Nations cultures that believe words are so valuable and powerful that they should be used with utmost care and respect and only when they have true meaning. Obviously no place for such thinking in the world of group-chatting. Ray Arnold, Richmond, B.C.