It is safe to say we all have these friends: They sent us a barrage of messages, not written, but spoken. Messages that could have been an email, but instead of being one, they go for minutes and ramble on and on and on. If you're anything like me, you might, or might not reply. Sometimes you don't even listen in. And then you ask yourself why? Why are you so annoying about these messages? After all, are they just a way of trying to keep in touch? To convey important information in an quick an efficient way? Maybe, just maybe, it is. Unless it isn't.

About efficiency

Of course, I see the advantages of voice messages. Ever since I was in school, I wondered why learning grammar and orthography were so important. I grew up to become a snob and I thought I had an answer for the first one: Because you need grammar to speak a language. For the second one, I thought I actually had one as well: Because you want to be able to understand and to be understood, in wtitten form, at least.

And then, there is this new paradigm: using your voice form messagea instead of writing them down. It has all advantages that written text has: the on demand availability, the asynchronousity, and portability. And yet it comes without the overhead of having to take time to write the things down or or the need of a special framework that lets you code these thoughts into words that can be shipped for other people to understand them, meaning orthography and punctuation. So why oppose this method?

About structure

First things first, let's get the elephant out of the way: In this article, I am writing by dictating my words into my phone. So, in a way, this is a voice message I'm broadcasting through my blog, in written form. Structurally different, you might argue. But is it really that different? DonI just have a fetish with the written word or is there some fundamental difference between written ans spoken mesages?

One of the things that I really don't like about voice messages is the lack of structure. It is, as if the person who's sending them is having an inner monologue without any feedback, without any restraint, without any pressure of being logical, or have any clarity in the thoughts. This, I have always imaginea, is probably due to the lack of common context. Is a linguist I would like to have more information on this, but alas, I do not. Be as it may, this is the the biggest issue I am having when writing this article. I'm trying to focus on one sentence at the time without forgetting that every sentence is but a small part of a paragraph and every paragraph part of a text. So trying to be cohesive it takes a lot more attention that it normally would just talking to someone. It is as if I would suddenly would have to relearn speaking, the same way I had to relearn language back when I learnt to write. I like to think that I'm not making the same mistake, I so painfully dislike about my peers sending voice messages, of forgetting context or not being cohesive. I my case, being able to read every single word I am saying, after I say it, might be the only thing that is helping me to avoid this mistake. Normally, fleeting voice messages don't offer the possibility.

I think it is pretty obvious that everyone speaks differently and that nobody writes the way they speak. And still, most of my friends I speak to more than I write to them. So, in a way, I should be more accustomed to listening to them than to reading them. And this is probably the main difference: Voice messages are not a dialogue at least not a synchronous one. The same way speaking to a machine is not a dialogue. People think differently when they're talking to a machine. They speak differently when they're talking to a machine. They structure differently when they're talking to a machine.

The challenge

I know I tend to sound anti-technology in most of my blog posts. But truly, I am not. For me technology is a way to simplify life while keeping the most important, most human aspects in our interactions and in our lives. In recent years, structural change has challenged this in unprecedented ways. While I think it is most natural to look for convenience, I also think it is crucial to reflect on the patterns and trade offs that come hand in hand with these structural changes.

For me, personally, being talked to as a machine is something that utterly disgusts me. Having to go through a two-minute tremble about something that could have been put in two lines of texts, sickens me. But being able to put my thoughts into words, long sentences and long written texts with just the power of my voice, entices me. And so, while doing this experiment, to write my first post using just my voice, I ask myself: am I losing something of my ability to plan a text, or is it just a new skill, maybe yet an undeveloped one that we are trying to master? As with so many other exciting tech issues, only time will tell.