Ping! My phone vibrates with a message from a new friend. A mild spike of dopamine dissipates on seeing she’s left me a WhatsApp voice note. However, it’s short and, hopefully, it’s a one-off.
I reply with a text message, hoping she’ll register the switch in communications. Ping! Oh no. She’s a voice-noter. She’s a bloody voice-noter. And this one is well over two minutes long and I don’t know her very well, so I’m going to have to listen to the whole thing without speeding it up. It’s an invitation to dinner, but this does nothing to quell my mounting frustration and irrational thoughts of disengaging myself from this nascent friendship.
‘Yes great thanks,’ I reply by text, without – pointedly – an ‘X’.
Miles Davis declared ‘the greatest sound in the world is the human voice’ – but then he never had to wade through ten minutes of rambling internal monologue in response to a text enquiring: ‘And what would my godson like for his birthday?’
Since WhatsApp introduced the voice note in 2013, allowing users to send short audio messages, their use has grown exponentially.
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