Millennials don’t like phone calls. Survey after survey reports that the phone call is in decline, thanks to us pesky, avocado-loving 20-to-30-somethings preferring to text than talk. So why are we even entertaining the idea of voice notes?
Voice notes – which have become something of a phenomenon on WhatsApp and are also available on other messaging apps such as iMessage and Instagram – allow you to send short audio recordings instead of a written message. Just hold down the microphone button, blather whatever you want to say into your phone and hit send. Your recipient then hits play to listen to your message at their convenience (or rather not, as we shall see).
There are advantages to voice notes. For most of us, talking comes more naturally than writing, and verbal communication benefits greatly from the ability to use tone of voice to help convey emotion or get your meaning across. There are also practical reasons why a voice note might seem to make sense. Maybe you have a condition that makes texting difficult (in which case, voice notes are of course completely acceptable), or maybe you simply have your hands full with the dog or the baby or the washing up and don’t want to get your phone grubby.
Or – and be honest, now – maybe you just love the sound of your own voice. See, here’s the problem with voice notes: while they’re often more convenient for you as a sender – just hit record and speak! – they’re almost always less convenient for your recipient. While it’s usually faster to talk than to type, it’s slower to listen to an audio recording than it is to glance at a text – plus it’s impossible to refer back to a voice note at a later moment if you don’t want to respond right away. Given good manners means respecting other people’s time, unscrupulous use of voice notes is therefore decidedly poor digital etiquette.
Comparing voice notes to phone calls isn’t quite fair. Despite being a proud Gen Y-er, I actually have nothing against phone calls – so long as they are prearranged. The problem with unscheduled phone calls is that they almost always catch you at a bad time, but you feel obliged to pick them up anyway just in case it’s some kind of emergency (because what sort of inconsiderate person would just call out of the blue if it wasn’t?). You don’t have to send a Google Calendar invite or anything (in fact, please don’t), but at least send a text first to ask if it’s a good time to chat.
WhatsApp voice notes don’t technically require you to be on the other end of the line right at that moment; you can supposedly pick them up at your leisure. But if you’re mid-conversation with someone, you can’t continue the chat without listening to the note – not least because the sender can tell whether you’ve bothered to or not, thanks to the “play receipts” feature, which you can’t turn off. This means that, before you can continue your conversation, or even start a new one with the same person, you have to scrabble around for your headphones, or hit pause on your favourite podcast or playlist, to listen to some rambling nonsense you probably weren’t actually interested in anyway. And if you don’t, you’re the rude one.
This wouldn’t be a problem if people used voice notes sensibly – i.e., if they kept them as short as possible. A witty one-liner? Fine. A quick response to show how excited you are about something? Sure. A cute clip of your toddler niece or nephew stumbling over how to pronounce the word “vacuum cleaner”? Aww.
But people don’t do this, do they? No, they’ll send you a ten-minute monologue instead, in three acts. Don’t even get me started on group chats, where if you fall behind a voice note back-and-forth you end up having to listen through a whole load of them back-to-back just to keep up with what’s happening, like trudging through a poorly-edited soap opera omnibus. When this happens, voice notes aren’t like phone calls. They’re worse. They’re voicemails.
When you feel the need to send a voice note instead of a text message, then, the best etiquette is simply to ask yourself why you’re doing it. Is it for you, or for your recipient? Do you think they will really, truly appreciate it, or are you just doing it because you’re lazy, or it’s more convenient for you, or because you think you’re some great orator whose invitation to give a TED Talk must have got lost in the post? (If the latter, may I recommend you just go and start a podcast, where the rest of us can gladly choose to ignore you.)
If you are genuinely a great storyteller whose friends really love to hear your extended voice notes, at least send a text as well with the gist of what it’s about, so people can choose whether and when to listen. And never send multiple long voice notes one after the other.
As for when you’re on the receiving end, if you find yourself stuck with a voice note you have zero desire to listen to all the way through, you can always just try replying with this handy catch-all text response suitable for at least 90 percent of WhatsApp conversations: “haha”.
Victoria Turk a senior editor at WIRED UK, and author of Digital Etiquette, published by Ebury