If you think this generation is all about texting, think again. We have got a more intimate way of talking. Combining the intimacy of phone calls with the non-intrusive nature of texts, here’s to voice notes, the best form of communication invented by humankind.
What do you do when you have a complicated story to tell, and you want to tell it while doing your laundry or walking home? Do you do it over the phone while the person on the other end asks you to repeat every two minutes? Nah, you send a clean, hassle-free voice note. You can take your pauses, reflect on what you have to communicate and say it.
Taking over phone call
Voice notes are not intrusive as a phone call. Many argue that phone calls are dead: if you can text it, why dial it? I say, why dial at all when you can say the message out loud. Yes, send a voice note, that’s all. Nobody would get disturbed, nobody’s phone would ring and embarrass them in a meeting or a movie theatre; they can open the message and hear the content as and when they want. What’s more, you don’t have to look through infinite emojis to put your feelings across.
Personally, I’m not in the emoji brigade. I’d never use the ‘angry’ emoticon if I were actually furious, or the ‘blushing’ smiley if I were actually blushing. To be honest, the sense of emojis differs from person to person. Some people overdo it to an annoying extent, while some completely stay away from it. No matter how hard you try or decorate your text with countless emojis, the essence of what you are trying to say would never be captured in a text.
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The personal touch
There’s an intimacy to the voice that a text doesn’t have. More than what you say, it’s how you say it that matters. It’s easy to type away what you want to say, but when it comes to expressing how you mean it, texting fails. Oftentimes we type and delete, type and delete, look for the perfect emoji to ensure that what we mean lands softly while being clear in articulation. But how many times does it really happen?
Voice notes get rid of this ambiguity. Have you ever tried to have an argument or a debate over voice notes? Try it, they’re cleaner, simpler, and eliminate shouting matches that phone calls usually turn into — or the confusing mess that text messages become.
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Voice message is forever
They say the first thing you forget after someone dies is their voice. Like I don’t remember what my father or grandfather sounded like. I wish I could communicate with them through voice notes, so I could go back and hear how they talked to me, scolded me, or how they laughed. Those are the kind of things we send on voice notes, don’t we?
In fact, Alexander Graham Bell left behind a voice note for all of us, you can listen to it here. Even though it’s full of static noise, one can easily decipher what he said over a century ago. This is something that no letter, no text, could potentially gift us.
Today, my phone rings to a strumming of guitars, composed for me by someone I was once romantically involved with. Text messages or phone calls can’t even aspire to be this intimate or gift-worthy. Not a gifted musician myself, I sent a horrendous voice note of me giggling, for him to ‘hear me laugh’ whenever he wants to.
We broke up shortly after.
Thank god he didn’t do it over a voice note — that’s one voice message I would rather not receive.