By Isaac Chan (25A01B)
Let’s face it — personal Telegram channels are like a game of chess.
What begins as an innocent way to vent and save you the hassle of repeating the same story to seven friends ends as some hopeless strategy puzzle Sun Tzu himself would be proud of — one that has you questioning how close you really are to your social circle, the degree to which you can (or should!) express yourself, and what repercussions removing or adding someone to your channel might have.
How did we get here?
In the last few years, Telegram has surged in popularity amongst youths for personal conversations. The personal Telegram channel (a ‘tele’ TE-lee, as the cool kids say) is a fascinating product of these developments — many of us use these to talk about our lives, share funny anecdotes, or as an outlet for frustrations and woes. It’s a unique blend of a blog and a chat with a friend — regular life updates, but each post reads much more like a quick text to a friend than a polished recollection. With online informality becoming a hallmark of the online social milieu of the 2020s (see: brands making sh*tposts to sell their product), it’s no wonder these have found their place in the fabric of teenage social interaction.
Tele channels add more layers to the lasagna of our online existence, offering a sort of upgrade to the already-befuddling Instagram main-and-spam system. One interviewee put it this way: the Instagram main is for social events, while the Instagram spam is for life in general. The Telegram main channel is for random thoughts, while, for those secretive (and popular!) enough to have one, the Telegram spam channel is for scalding-hot gossip too juicy to announce to any double-digit group.
Confused yet? Same. Why do we need so many digital media through which to be who we are? Why do we need two platforms (perhaps three, for the Rafflesians of TikTok fame) just to exist online? And why would people even want to be in your tele?
Before I had a channel, teles seemed a little inherently narcissistic.
Unlike a regular group chat, the uniqueness of the tele lies in its ‘comments’ feature. This makes you, the channel owner, the ‘main character’, while your friend groups coalesce and mingle in the comments sections of messages sent. You’re literally talking about your life and implicitly asking your friends to fawn over it — or that’s what it seemed. After I started joining channels and having my own, I realised there’s a little more to it than that.
Inescapable FOMO defines much of our social existence: scalding-hot ‘tea’/gossip and ‘Instagram stalking’ are only some of the many ways we alleviate what could charitably be termed as insatiable curiosity, and less charitably as kaypoh-ness. The tele channel appeals to this desire — you are let straight into the mind of the channel owner, and you can ‘stalk’ away. Know all there is to know about them. See how they react to things that happen to them. Learn what their day-to-day looks like.
One respondent goes so far as to describe being in others’ teles as a form of ‘entertainment’, and says he would leave a channel if their life is too uninteresting — like a reality show you stop watching because the plot becomes too circular. Others are a bit less direct/objectifying: Foo Zee Yann (25A01B) says knowing about her friends’ lives brings her joy, while Nat Loh Xuan Lin (25A01B) describes it as an honour to be close enough to someone to be in their tele.
It’s not one-way, either. We all want to share stuff about our lives, to seek empathy, validation, and catharsis. Whether it’s a recap about a funny encounter or an impassioned tirade about an indefensible injustice (your Mixue ice cream fell on the floor), the Telegram offers the path of least resistance to do so — you don’t even have to hit ‘Create mode’ on Instagram to make a story on your spam anymore. Just do what it takes to send a text, and your message is out to the world (or your three closest kakis).
This symbiotic relationship fuels a transaction between the wanting-to-know and the willing-to-share — demand and supply, as it were. But for the most part, the supplier isn’t willing to supply to all consumers. For the channel owner, who gets to buy in?
What dictates when you can add someone to your tele? Is it when you’ve gone out 1-on-1 and it isn’t awkward? Is it when you’ve been friends for a year? Is it just anybody you talk to semi-regularly? Channel membership numbers (at least for the ones I’m in) can range from a paltry three (Gatekeeper Extraordinaire) to an eye-watering 56 (okay Popular Queen).
Different people have different yardsticks, of course. Zee Yann sets one of her personal criteria as someone she’d be “willing to tell a grade on a test [she] failed”. Another respondent strives to keep his tele membership count as a ‘single-digit’.
The function of your tele certainly matters — for some, the tele is just a way to complain or talk about random inconsequential stuff. For others, it’s an intimate view into their minds — one describes it as a “way to look back on what I once was”. The tele channel, for many people, is a place of vulnerability, becoming a sort of social journal for thoughts, opinions, and events.
But that level of openness is volatile, maybe dangerous. You’re always faced with the threat that your vulnerability is fodder for someone else’s gossip — word always seems to get around the second you’re not careful. So, what if you decide someone shouldn’t get that security clearance to your mind anymore?
Relationships change on a dime. Sometimes, you feel safe ranting to someone. Soon after, you don’t. And that’s fine.
But if they’re in your tele, that complicates matters.
What do you do then? Nat Loh says that despite not feeling great about it, the tele being a “safe space” is the ultimate goal, so kicking someone out is sometimes necessary. Another respondent says he is too “paiseh”, or shy, to remove anyone, opting for the cop-out tele spam instead.
Okay, say you chose the removal path. Brave.
Unlike an Instagram spam, where a removal might take a couple of days to notice when the weekly update posts eventually stop showing up, the tele removal is conspicuous. For the individual so cruelly severed from someone’s enchanting daily chronicles, the change is stark. One day, you’re receiving constant life updates from a certain ‘econs A plsplspls’, and the next day you just… aren’t.
Some may just sigh, accept that the friendship is inevitably fading because everyone has their own social circles, and move on. The bolder amongst us, though, might ask the owner of ‘econs A plsplspls’ about what happened.
What is our Economics lover here going to say? “We’re not that tight anymore”? “That one thing you said kind of made me rethink our friendship, you’re kinda weird”? It’s never going to be a pleasant conversation. It’s going to be awkward, it’s going to be tough, and it’s going to push over a possibly already-teetering friendship.
Yet, not asking leaves so many things unanswered. Maybe they just got tired of their channel and closed it, and you’re still besties. Maybe you’re still close, but they’re only letting Tier 1 friends stay. Or maybe they legitimately just hate you now. Whatever the case may be, the very act of removal leads us to think something changed, and drastically at that.
The reality is, tele membership control is wholly incompatible with how our social connections form and fade. While drifting apart is gradual and natural, removing someone from your channel is decisive and intentional — it’s the executioner’s axe coming down, severing the ties of your once-close-knit friendship. Losing access to the closeness you once had hurts, even if you know it shouldn’t.
Tele channels and their associated norms are, to me, their own brand of politics — adding, removing, and keeping information contained are art forms of their own. On the other side of the coin, why you got removed from or why you’re not in someone’s channel are unanswerable, or at least awkward, questions.
While writing this, I’m having a tough time coming up with some meaningful conclusion. But maybe there isn’t some aphoristic, insightful ending I can append to this article — it really isn’t that deep. It’s just hard to reconcile such decisiveness and delineation when dealing with imprecise and nebulous social relationships. Emotions that are difficult to manage can and will follow. But the best answer I can give, at least, is to live with the fact that relationships change and try to be who we really are, as best as we can. Maybe we just gotta care less.