Voice notes

I keep seeing the same argument being played out across “old Twitter’s” children.

Old person¹ : Voice note messages are annoying and obnoxious. I’m going to listen to them in case it’s a “oh god I’ve just broken all my fingers, I had to send this message by tapping my phone screen with my nose, please send urgent help” - but no, it’s always more like a rambling private podcast about a half-formed thought you couldn’t even be bothered to put into sentences. Please make them go away.

Young person: Yeah, but voice notes have all the nuance that gets lost in the written word, the emotion, the inflection - you’re not expected to drop everything and listen to it now; listen whenever you’ve got a quiet moment. Listen later. Listen instead of doomscrolling through a bunch of the world’s worst news and nutjob conspiracy theories. When you want to give your eyes a rest.

In 1994, I was a teenager working in a mobile phone software testing job. SMS wasn’t a "thing" yet - disabled on the consumer version of the phones, and so I was told, "only used for engineering purposes". But it was screamingly obvious to me (a teenager who couldn't afford a mobile phone - they were expensive) in a world where taking a mobile call in public was still seen the height of obnoxiousness, being able to receive and reply to a text message was a far better alternative. It was obviously better in lots of contexts than a phone call- which was all a phone could do at the time. If you missed a call, you got a voicemail - and voicemails were a poor alternative to a call. But if I had a mobile phone, I knew that I'd be using text messages all the time.

We lived in an aural world - smartphones were still a few years away (even the first-generation smartphone Blackberry/PalmPilot/PDA type things), email was something people in offices used. People talked on the phone. Yes, we sent letters - but they were 'special'; the sort of thing you would keep, rather than throw away after you'd read it.

A couple of years later, I got a mobile phone (thanks to steep employee discounts through the same job.) A couple of years after that, some of my friends started to get them too. And it turned out, text messages were incredibly useful - being able to go to the Notting Hill carnival with only the vaguest plan to meet a friend there at around lunchtime, then coming out of the tube station and getting a text message telling me exactly where to find them was just... magical. (Those were the days when if you planned to meet someone and they didn't show up, you could be sitting around for hours not knowing if they had forgotten, gone somewhere else, were stuck on a train station platform because their train had been cancelled etc. - or if you'd just got the meeting place/date/time wrong. The Notting Hill carnival is not the sort of place you could just 'meet someone there'.)

Voice notes, for a generation raised on ubiquitous mobile text with calls relegated to a rarely-used app, are just as obviously better that texts in lots of contexts. But these are totally different contexts, and totally different reasons. It’s a step away from the visual world of the screen, and into the aural world that older generations grew up on.

For our generation, it’s a step backwards. For theirs, it’s a step forwards. But they live in the same place - the messages app - so there’s a friction between the two groups of people, heading in different directions, from a different starting point, but finding themselves in the same place.

That kind of friction is always interesting.

1. Obviously, anything that generalises across different generations like this is going to be an over-generalisation; I know this. ↩