“Sorry for the audio” is the phrase that most irritates Guillermo, a 38-year-old journalist from Madrid. “If you already know that you are acting badly, why do you do it?” he asks. Like him, a growing group of people has decided to stand up to the invasion of voice notes on WhatsApp. They have found their new manna in the recent automatic transcription.
The resistance has its reasons. “They are the most inefficient thing that has ever been invented in communications between mobile phones,” argues Samuel, a 44-year-old Sevillian. “In text messages we are concise. People get to the point and summarize as much as possible. In the audios there is a lot of detour, pausesunnecessary repetitions”.
The conflict goes beyond efficiency: It’s a battle for mutual respect. “Your time is not worth more than mine,” summarizes Guillermo. “We cannot take 30,000 years of language evolution for you to now decide that communication is like that.” In his case he even created a sticker sarcastic with which to respond to the audios: an Ondas award.
The Ondas award with which Guille responds to whoever sends him an audio. Image: WorldOfSoftware.
Some have taken a hard line to confront this penultimate hateful trend on the Internet. Manuel, a 27-year-old teacher from Valencia, has cut it short: “I tell them directly that I don’t listen to audios. If it’s important, they should call me or write to me. I’ve lost friends because of this, but I don’t care.”
His position is born from experience: “My colleagues sent me audios with questions about something about work at eleven at night. It annoys me that they do it just like that by text, but that on top of that they were audios… it was unsustainable.”
Forced asynchrony is another friction point. “They force you to stop everything to hear them,” explains Samuel. “They’re not like text messages, which you can see at a glance. Imagine that you’re shopping in a supermarket and you can’t even hear what they’re saying properly. What can happen then? That you have to hear it twice?”
Samuel, in fact, has had the same WhatsApp status for almost four years: a deterrent to being sent audios, especially if they are long.
Samuel’s condition has been there for almost four years. Image: WorldOfSoftware.
The resistance has its strategies. Emilio, a Cantabrian salesman, has developed a protocol: “I only accept audio for emergencies or to tell something that requires specific intonation. The rest goes to the digital cemetery.” Their tactic: ignore the audio until the sender asks if they heard it.. “90% of the time, they end up writing the message.”
There is room for pragmatism. Guillermo accepts exceptions: “If someone warns that they are going to tell something very long and complex, I accept it. I listen to it like a podcast while I walk the dog.” Although technology doesn’t help: “WhatsApp goes crazy with the headphones, as if it were a personal affront that I want to listen to the audio in private.”
Sometimes his sarcastic responses are not entirely intelligible to his interlocutor.
Image: WorldOfSoftware.
Even the staunchest opponents occasional concessions. “I use them just enough,” admits Samuel. “If at a moment I can’t write, I send one. But my audios are 10 or 15 seconds, transmission of the message and end.”
The consensus among the resisters is clear: one-way audio perverts the essence of dialogue. “It’s a monologue disguised as a dialogue,” says Manuel. “And on top of that,” adds Emilio, “they expect an elaborate response to their three-minute soliloquy.”
The battle seems lost, but the insurgents maintain their position. “At least,” Guillermo concludes with irony, “they don’t forward other people’s audios. We are not here to distribute fast food conversational”.
In WorldOfSoftware | Write like this for whatsapp just ask that you don’t want to respond. science says it
Featured image | WorldOfSoftware
