That’s the joke Hanna Einbinder’s Gen Z character Ava plays to her baby boomer employer Deborah Vance in the first season of the HBO show Hux. “I had horrible nightmares about getting voicemails,” she says. Ha – Gen Z hates voicemail. Baby boomers can’t understand jokes without a punch line. “What?” Jean Smart’s Vance screeches. Ha, everyone gets fed up with it, and each generation refuses to give an inch to the other.
Sorry to mix up Gen X, but in the context of this particular Flashpoint, we need to talk about voice memos. (Or audio message, or voice text. Not to be confused with voice-to-text conversion, which is something else entirely. Okay, Grandma?)
For me, it started a few years ago when a friend left me a voice memo because she was driving and couldn’t respond to a text in the traditional way. This was a hassle, but it was done with safety in mind, so it wasn’t a problem. Over time, the goalposts shifted. Voice messages are now appearing in other contexts as well, often starting with a half-apology, “I can’t type,” or a coy plea for understanding because someone has their hands full. The pretext was efficiency, allowing the sender to communicate while walking down the street or unloading a stack of dishwashers, and if the tone was self-conscious, it was because of my generation. This is because voice memos are not native and could not be safely predicted. How the message medium is delivered.
Anyway, that was the beginning. Since then, of course, people have been seduced by the prospect of a bottomless bucket into which to throw their meager ideas and have quickly lost their minds. (I just looked it up and it turns out that when it comes to voice memos, the only limit is the amount of internal storage on your iPhone. And your imagination!)
I remember the moment several years ago when the first communication that followed what would become the standard voice memo protocol took place. The friend I hung up with left me 3 consecutive messages, each lasting over 3 minutes, and sent me more messages. Lost in her thoughts, she hung up and left another message, which she deleted, before launching into a three-minute finale. Then I stared at my phone in horror. This wasn’t a message; it was an audience for a one-woman show, a podcast I didn’t subscribe to. Sure, she was my friend, but this wasn’t even a friendship. This was a hostage-taking.
Given the similarities, it’s still strange that voice messages are embraced in places where voicemail has been phased out. Voice Memos’ interface and access points are more appealing than voicemail because they are embedded within the flow of an existing text conversation. And perhaps voice memos benefit from being a channel associated only with friendship. The bank won’t leave me a voice WhatsApp. And as far as I know, there’s no spam or robo voice memos either. And as, recent polls In the United States, more than 60% of Americans say they have sent a voice message, and the majority of users are under 30 years old. The number is huge. In 2022, WhatsApp will be approx. 7 billion voice messages Sent on the app daily.
It’s hard not to see all of this as a small expression of rising levels of narcissism in general. Aside from the completely uninvited invasion of time, the solipsism of one-sided conversations, and the fact that you have to wait for minutes at a time to get to the point of your message, the main problems with voice memos are quite large. The gap between the message sender’s idea of how interesting the message is and the reality of the person experiencing the 90-second set. Your whimsical flights are not as fancy or whimsical as you think. Also, other people don’t need to know your raw reactions to what’s happening in the city while you’re talking.
Anyway, this was all just my opinion, last week a dear friend left me three voice memos in a row and I decided to retaliate with one of my own late in the game. I’m not an early adopter. I’ve never left a voice memo before, and my first note was something like, “Is this on?”
Ha! I thought. How fascinating this looks! And then I left. my god. Have you ever done one of these? I started on point, but something in my kitchen caught my eye and I did it for 15 seconds. I got sidetracked by thoughts about mutual friends. Then my kids came in the door and started yelling at me about something – oh she’s going to love this I thought! That’s practically the audio truth! I ended with a joke. What a wonderful gift for the recipient! What a moment for me. What a performance!
Source: www.theguardian.com
