Reels, reacjis & conversations with friends

Emojis, GIFs, stickers, reacjis and Al-generated suggestions occupy the spaces where sentences framed by humans once thrived, leaving us to contend with how this changes the way we express, connect with, and understand each other and ourselves

- Shephali Bhatt

hantanu Anand, 33, stays in touch with friends through "pebbling". Every night, he opens his Instagram DMs to see the reels his friends have sent him during the day. He reacts with emoticons, called reacjis, forwards some to other friends, and moves on. That's the full arc of most of his friendships now: reel, reacji, repeat. In some cases, he feels it's an improvement over not being in touch altogether.

His experience is far from unique. Last week, Instagram's own broadcast channel, What's Good on Instagram, spotlighted a reel by @thefunfashionista, titled "Are you even best friends if your chat doesn't look like this?" The video—now sitting at over half a million likes—shows a chat window between two users that’s nothing but an endless stream of reels and reacjis they exchange.

What's missing from these chats? Words.

Words are slipping out of our digital lives as more people's interactions with their social circles depend on reels and reacjis. Technology has slowly eaten into our need to use words even as generative AI erodes our ability to string them together into cohesive sentences. What started with SMS shorthand born out of character limits and evolved through erstwhile Twitter's brevity has eventually come to all platforms prioritising visuals over text.

Across social media and messaging apps, emojis, GIFs, stickers, reacjis, template replies and AI-generated suggestions occupy the spaces where sentences framed by a human once thrived. In effect, words have not just become less common, they’ve become optional, leaving us to contend with how this changes the way we express, connect with, and understand each other and ourselves.