WHETHER IT’S A GROUP TEXT with buddies or a Facebook Messenger thread involving extended family, many people use chat tools to communicate in a closed environment. David Tuffley of Australia’s Griffith University School of Information and Communication Technology has studied the generational differences in group messaging. His guidelines:

Many younger people think of group chats as a place to make throwaway comments or share a funny thought, Tuffley says. But older adults may have been raised in a culture where communication was more intentional. Think of a group chat as a fun space, like a party, rather than the place to unload about serious matters in your life. Save those conversations for phone calls.

We think of spam as unwanted commercial solicitations, but there’s a similar dynamic in a group chat: Nobody likes it when one person monopolizes the conversation, Tuffley notes. If you’re sending endless pictures of your dog, remember that everyone in the thread will receive a notification each time you post. Choose your messages wisely.

If you’re riffing with one person, it can be easy to forget there’s an audience watching. Take one-to-one catch-up talk elsewhere.

Whether you’re sharing someone’s address or the password to a streaming service, remember you have even less control than usual over where personal data ends up when multiple people are receiving it.

Everyone takes different amounts of time to reply to a message, and that’s OK, Tuffley says. Younger people tend to be much busier online and may not respond to your posts right away. “The younger generation has an explicitly acquired skill set for managing the flow of information,” he points out. In other words, if you’re getting ghosted, don’t take it personally. —Niamh Rowe