Does this sound familiar to anyone? “Hello… umm… yeah… I don’t know… mmm… like I think… yeah…” This is a near direct transcription of part of a voice message I recently received on WhatsApp.
Such floundering is infuriating to read, never mind listen to. And the beauty of the written message was that, during its short-lived reign, this just wasn’t something you ever had to put up with. Sadly, the sun has now set on that day.
Let me start with a brief history of communication technologies: a couple of years ago, we’d finally arrived at a glorious moment in human development where having to communicate verbally, never mind actually speak to people face-to-face, had become almost entirely optional. Most of our interactions began taking place through written messaging: email, Messenger, WhatsApp, Viber, Telegram, Slack, or even SMS, if retro was your thing.
Actually calling people had become nearly obsolete. Now, you might argue that this signalled something terrible for humanity as a whole, but for those of us with a low-key fear of, and general aversion to, speaking on the phone (especially to strangers, god forbid), well, this total degeneration of human connection meant things were really going our way. No longer did you have to fear the horror of dialling the wrong number and having to awkwardly excuse yourself, or dread mispronouncing the name of somebody very important, among endless other nightmarish situations. Of course, phone calls are not a completely dead idea, and many people still enjoy being able to live 121 chat with the hottest girls using their phones. However, in general, these activities seem to have been replaced by social media interactions.
The fleeting window between the death of the phone call and the present era was a fine time to be alive for phone-call haters
Even apart from general phone shyness, phone call culture threw up a host of other grievances. We all had that one friend who, once you saw their name flash up, you knew it was the end: should you dare to accept, you wouldn’t be putting that phone down until you could no longer feel your ear and your wrists showed worrying signs of carpal tunnel.
These friends, we know, were usually bored walking home (the classic), procrastinating general life responsibilities, or just needed to be constantly telling somebody about themselves – and fair play to them. But you shouldn’t be obliged to sit there and let them chew your ear off at their will. You deserve to waste your boundless spare time however you choose to without all that undue pressure, and the intensive emotional labour of saying “mmm, yeah” every five minutes.
Luckily, with the advent of text-dominated messaging, these ear-chewers could gleefully ramble ad nauseam over a messaging app, and you could then skim at your leisure, with strings of emojis making for even less effort than the traditional spoken platitudes. Friendship had never been easier and, instead of investing energy in real people, you were all the more free to while away your hours in a more self-absorbed manner of choice.
This fleeting window between the death of the phone call and the present era was a fine time to be alive for phone-call haters. A golden age of sorts. And I was casually basking in the glory of this, almost taking it for granted, when a new phenomenon crept up and took me by surprise. It began as a novelty. To tell you the truth, I barely looked up from my mindless scrolling to take note at first. But it’s become unavoidable.
“Ha ha, I’m too lazy to write this so I’ll just speak it.” Followed by 20 minutes of mindless gab. I’m talking about the voice message. The audio clip. Whatever you want to call it.
This new trend is insidious. Worse, far worse than the ear-chewers of the past. Because you can’t excuse yourself. It gives you the illusion of choice – you can, supposedly, listen to it at a time that suits you – but in fact, its control is just more subtle, because there is no escape. The conversation is no longer temporally constrained. It can haunt you endlessly.
There’s only so often you can get away with ‘oh sorry, I can’t listen to this right now’. You know that they know that you never leave the house without headphones, or that you probably rarely leave your house at all, let’s be honest. You’ll have to listen to it, eventually. You have to sit down, turn off Spotify or Netflix, and listen. Full concentration, or as close as your flittery 21st-century brain can get. No more strategically getting away with being a subpar friend. Oh no. Those days are long gone.
What’s worse is that, to respond, you practically have to take notes. How do you even begin to reply to a 20-minute-long voice message? Twenty minutes equates to approximately 3,000 words, longer than most college essays I’ve written. You don’t want to be busted for zoning out, so you have to pay careful attention to make sure you’ve got all the information before formulating a reply. They might be testing you by dropping the most crucial bit in in the middle, during what appears to be a long and pointless ramble, so don’t be caught out.
Such long audio messages also completely drain your phone battery life, which as we all know is precious and needs to be reserved for meaningful things, like watching vines
If you want to give any kind of coherent response, it requires essay-like planning and structuring to make sure you counter every point. You even have to partially transcribe and then quote their own message back to them so that they know what part you’re responding to, especially because, in all fairness, they’ve probably forgotten what they said themselves, drivelesque as it probably was.
And what about when you aren’t able to make out something they said, and need to hear it again? Well. If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to drag the slider back a bit and listen to that part again. But some apps don’t let you do this (seriously, Facebook? We’ve handed every last bit of valuable personal data we have to you on a plate, yet you can’t you do this one thing for us?) meaning you have to listen to the whole damn thing again, from the very beginning. Other more humane apps allow you to return to a couple of arbitrary points, meaning that you might get lucky and only have to replay the previous two minutes or so.
Such long audio messages also completely drain your phone battery life, which as we all know is precious and needs to be reserved for meaningful things, like watching vines.
Then there’s the Sunday morning voice message. It’s painful enough just scrolling past a ream of cringeworthy drunk messages, but actually listening to them? You may literally die of secondhand embarrassment – or firsthand, if you’re the one who sent them. See, this audio option doesn’t do anybody any favours. It’s a dangerous enabler. At least before, nobody was bothered to listen to their voicemail anymore, or remembered that their phone still had that function.
Last night, a friend had both the good grace and the unbelievable cheek to ask: “Can I send an audio?”. And do you know what I said?
Well, OK, I said “yeah of course”. Probably because for some inexplicable reason unrelated to our modern era, I have appalling communication skills. But rest assured – and (figuratively) hear this now, loud and clear – I will silently resent every last voice message I will ever have to listen to and then, inwardly raging, proceed to say absolutely nothing whatsoever about it.
