Every group has its objectives, and I find it hard to understand why it’s difficult for us to simply comply with objectives of the groups we belong to. I belong to groups elsewhere and admins never make any rules, yet nobody abuses the objectives of the group. For example, the different groups for my kids’ schools. Not even one day has someone ever posted anything that is not related to school, even if the country is on fire, except it affects the movement of the kids or something like that! I am in tens of these groups with same result, never abused. These groups can be docile for days or weeks or months with no activity, except something relevant to the group comes up.
In Nigeria, first the admin will have to make the rules. Yet the rules are disobeyed with careless abandon. A group is setup for a specific purpose like a project and the first thing someone posts is a church reflection or some spiritual thing – we are just over spiritual, but at the same time over sinful!
Next is a video one has seen like 5 years ago. Next is one political post. And then, one network marketing thing, and on and on like that. It is some joke? These days it is anti-vaccine conspiracy theories of all sorts. I won’t even mind if these posts are composed by those posting them so we can read their thoughts on issues. But we are too intellectually lazy to compose anything by ourselves. We just keep forwarding what others have written. We don’t even bother to crosscheck the facts before forwarding.
Bottom line, the group is turned into a junk yard. At the end, the purpose of the group is defeated. The sad thing is that, all classes of people are involved in this abuse of groups including intellectuals and well exposed people. The saddest part is that, some of those abusing Nigerian WhatsApp groups live abroad where they are careful not to abuse groups there.
Our intellectual laziness has even gone into seasonal greetings. People are simply too lazy to write a message and wish someone happy birthday or New Year and all. They simply just keep forwarding some graphic image one has seen like a zillion times! Me o, these days I don’t respond to any seasonal greetings that is not handwritten by the sender, never! If you don’t have 5 seconds to write me a message, why should I use my 1 minute to respond to you?!
It is only in Nigeria that you see people, including high ranking government officials always with their faces into their phones including when seated at cabinet or other important meetings. They are all trying to go through the tons of junk they received on their WhatsApp groups and other social media platforms. At the end, man-hours are just going down the drain and our productive capacities diminished because lazy people are busy forwarding junk messages to groups.
For me, there are many groups that when I see hundreds of messages, I just highlight them all and delete. Where is the time to go through all that junk? I won’t blame admins if they adopt high handed measures.
We are simply just an interesting group of species!
