It’s always a delicate moment for Marie, who is slowly approaching her 50th birthday, when the little notification appears on her mobile screen. “As much as answering the phone at the office doesn’t bother me, I might as well listen to a vocal in front of everyone: I can’t”, she says. It must be said that this mode of communication was somewhat imposed on him by his 16-year-old daughter. Rather than writing text messages, or even being bigoted, Charlotte does not hesitate to send sometimes very long voice messages to her mother, all without sorting through the information given. One question follows another, “uuuuh” multiply, laughter suddenly arrives because a friend is talking at the same time. “It annoys me, but what do you want… Even though I threatened not to listen to them anymore, I do it anyway, because I’m always afraid that there is an emergency”Marie resigns herself.
The voices of discord
The voice message no longer has much to do with the one that plagued answering machines a few decades ago. It is now consumed with the laptop horizontally glued to the ear, and in the same position in front of the mouth when it comes to recording one. Available mainly on instant messaging, and since 2013 on WhatsApp, this “voice” is gradually replacing conversation.
“The vocal has the advantage of being able to be listened to a bit like a podcast, a posteriori, asynchronouslysays Alexandre Eyriès, HDR teacher-researcher in information and communication science at the University of Lorraine. And above all, we do not need the consent of the other to pour out what we have to say, to tell our days and our loves”.
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What feeds the split is also the unpacking in the public space, the relationship to intimacy, and the fact of calling others to witness.
And the practice is divisive. Niki sees it “a less restrictive tool than SMS, much more difficult to write while walking” and Sasha considers it “very practical when you have to say something long”. Conversely, Antoine hates this new way of communicating: “if someone sends me a voicemail, I answer by message and specify that I will listen when I have time, a way of suggesting to my interlocutor not to start again”.
Alexandre Eyriès notes other factors: “Vocal is developing a lot among young people, while for older people, calling remains the best way to reach someone. What feeds the split is also the unpacking in the public space, the relationship to intimacy, and the fact of calling others to witness. It includes the people around in a process of listening”.
An evolution of the relationship to the private
But isn’t there a fairly classic neophobia (fear of novelty) here, which fuels the theory of “it was better before”? Maybe. No need to wait until 2023 to complain about a new mode of communication. In its time, the SMS had also made some enemies, who accused it of distorting the language, while the mobile phone was entitled, in 2002, to its rant baptized “I hate cell phones” and signed by a certain Alain Finkielkraut (Published in his book “The imperfect of the present”). You can not make that up.
If it is still about audio content, there is something that has changed with the arrival of voice: very often, it is consumed on loudspeaker and in all circumstances, without the need to concentrate. For the researcher, this translates “a form of digital exhibitionism”. It abounds: “We also see it on social networks, with a blurring of the border between the private and the public, between the intimate and what Michel Tournier (a sociologist, Editor’s note) called the extime, that is to say the intimate that overflows into the public space. There is also a form of jubilation in putting yourself on the stage, in attracting attention, which sometimes stems from unconscious strategies.”.
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Very often, the voice message is consumed on loudspeaker. Its user multiplies the pirouettes, telephone horizontally in front of the mouth or in the ear. Digital
However, we must be careful not to draw too hasty conclusions. If the youngest seem to show less modesty in the face of public accounts of their lives, the oldest are not saints either. “It is not necessarily young people, who have their AirPods in their ears and consume video content, that we see talking on the phone in the middle of a train during a train journey”, tempers the researcher. Especially since young people are overrepresented in this new mode of communication, and therefore necessarily more visible in its excesses.
I listen to you, me neither
“There is a form of refusal of commitment in vocalanalyzes Alexandre Eyriès. Face to face, the gaze of the other weighs on us permanently – this is the whole sociological theory of Erving Goffman – and we have to come to terms with it. He looks at us, he nods, smiles, grimaces, interrupts. There is, in my opinion, in the vocal, a refusal of the presence of the other. When we suppress the presence of the other, we free ourselves from misunderstandings, from the pressure, from the social gaze that weighs on us. There is also a form of laziness because conversation involves remaining attentive. It’s a heavy mental load. It’s difficult to escape a conversation that we have initiated, and the vocal prevents us from having this kind of case of conscience”.
On the other hand, it may be easier to send a voice than to converse for 20 minutes, because you have to hold the conversation, feed it, and it is difficult to get rid of it. “at the risk of a breach of the communication contract”, continues the researcher. An idea also formulated by Niki: “Where we agreed on a moment of tranquility to call each other, the exchanges are now spaced out and are done without particular concentration. The answers are therefore probably less spontaneous, more controlled and therefore perhaps less sincere”.
One thing remains certain and immutable, whatever the mode of communication: we love to listen to each other talk.
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