Is it a question of whether to send voice or text?

Pazilia (This article is reproduced from the public account "All Media Faction")

There was once a hot question, "Young people are increasingly dislike pronunciation, how to look at this phenomenon", the problem description proposed, many people "think that people who often pronounce voice are either selfish, uneducated or older".

Over the past few years, sending voice messages in social software has gradually become considered a manifestation of not understanding social etiquette and facilitating yourself to trouble others. Especially when the voice message is long, the number of messages is large, and the amount of information is small, it is easy to crash some listeners, not to mention the embarrassment of accidentally opening the external mode when listening to the voice on some special occasions.

However, for some groups, such as the elderly, voice is indeed a more convenient way. Especially for the group that speaks dialects all year round, the commonly used pinyin input method makes it more difficult to send text messages, and it is almost necessary to return to the primary school Chinese class in minutes.

In addition, there are voice proponents who believe that voice can make people feel intimate. Especially for friends and family who are not together, being able to hear each other's voices through mobile phones can be described as a great happiness brought by information technology to mankind. What's more, without voice function, what is the difference between that and the sms era?

At present, with the development of technologies such as voice input, voice to text, voice pause and continuation, the difference between voice messages and text messages on social media is also more obvious. This article will focus on the two basic media of text and sound, and put forward more thinking and exploration of their functions and two-way relationship with users.

Speech and text: the most basic way to communicate

In the poem "Once Upon a Time Slow", it is written: "Remember when I was a teenager / Everyone is sincere and sincere / Say a sentence is a sentence", and then it is written: "The old days became slow / Cars, horses, and mail were slow." In a short poem, it deals with conversation and letters, or the two most basic forms of communication, language and writing.

According to Innes's "communication bias theory", communication and media have a bias towards oral communication and a bias toward written communication, a bias toward time and a bias toward space. McLuhan summed it up as saying that the transmission of the mouth and the ear would be bound by time, while the transmission of the eyes, words, and writing would be bound by space.

Word of mouth is the most typical oral transmission, but it is clear that such conversation information cannot be stored for a long time; while letters can be retained for a long time, but they cannot be communicated in real time. We have many romantic stories about correspondence, from the book 84 Charing Cross Street to the movie Mary and Marx, and the protagonists all have a long exchange through letters that have traveled across the ocean.

But now that new media technologies are increasingly developed, it is hard to imagine that every message sent will have to wait days, even months, or years to receive a reply. Technology makes our communication easier, but also makes us more and more impatient with "slow", we look forward to receiving a reply immediately after the message is sent, and even many people think that the speed of the other party's reply to the message reflects the importance they attach to you.

The communication needs of the digital age have prompted mobile new media to continuously strive to build a complete communication system. Scholar Yao Jinsong pointed out that "the complete communication system = verbal behavior + non-verbal behavior + communication situation" [1], the development and application of sound functions in mobile new media is obviously to strengthen the role of speech behavior and communication situation in the communication system, and activate and strengthen the oral communication attributes of social media. This attribute provides a mediation for oral communication behavior to "retain time" through storage, whereby users can obtain an "intermediary form of interaction and experience"[2], and communication thus becomes an intermediary oral communication behavior, and more importantly, the oral communication that was once bound by time breaks through the limitations of time and space through the mediation of the new medium, and thus obtains a sense of "eternity".

Scholar Dong Chenyu once wrote: "In the face of new media, we need to put the new thing into the context of history in order to more clearly understand its true meaning." [3] For evolving social media, a historical perspective helps us better understand what they mean in the present. The message boards and comments in forums and microblogs are essentially similar in nature to the texts and dialogues that people have left on the city walls in history, which seems to prove that both ancient people and 21st century us have the same social needs and social instincts, and the evolving technology actually caters to and satisfies our social needs, but also changes our social ways and habits in a timely manner, and even affects the spread of civilization.

Thus, exploring the logical relationship behind voice communication and text communication in social media, we can return to technological development itself.

Behind the voice communication

Technological developments and social needs

Whenever a new medium emerges, people tend to think first about how to understand it.

Nancy M K. Baym (Nancy K. Baym) in "Communication in the Cloud: Interpersonal Relations in the Digital Age" analyzed that in terms of the relationship between technology and society, people's common views are: technological determinism, social construction theory and social formation theory, in which technological determinism believes that the lack of social clues and the potential asynchrony of transmission make the intimacy of mediated communication, the quality of interpersonal communication decline, and even produce confrontational contradictions. Further, the media's ability to provide interactive contexts determines the likelihood and confrontationality of the media in terms of communication, and the limited social cues (or interactive contexts provided) affect people, interpersonal relationships, and social class. [4]

If we use a more life-like example to explain, it can be understood by comparing face-to-face communication, phone calls, and online text conversations:

In face-to-face conversations, we can not only hear what the other person is saying, but also see each other's expressions and even body movements, which help us build deeper feelings and thus make the communication more personal;

In traditional telephone communication, we can't see each other, but we can judge each other's basic emotions through sound, which helps to establish a more intimate relationship, but the emotional level will be weaker than face-to-face;

Online text conversation is a convenient and not limited by time and space, but also because it cannot be seen or heard, it is easy to produce a cold feeling, and the same sentence and an expression may have different interpretations in different contexts, so it is not conducive to emotional communication.

In technical determinism, many people see the medium as an intermediary that communicates the emotions and intimacy of both parties. Such a stance implies distrust and accusations against social media. It is true that physical presence often implies emotional presence, and reliance solely on online communication may lead to what Shirley Turkel calls "group loneliness"[5], but human agency also enables people to inject sociality into mediated communication, thereby expressing emotions, expressing intimacy and entertainment, and establishing new social structures.

Thus, Byham points out, "Mediated communication should be seen as a novel, compatible, hybrid form of communication, not just a scaled-down version of embodied communication, as it combines elements of face-to-face communication with written communication, while using images more and more frequently." [6] He argues that instead of focusing on how intermediaries affect communication, he thinks about how people deal with mediated communication.

In other words, technology doesn't determine how people use it, and perhaps technology can determine the starting point for use, but it can never determine the end point for use. Behind people's need for social interaction is the instinct of emotional communication, which will make us constantly have "emotional compensation" behavior when using technology, and many scholars will always be accustomed to using the "use and satisfaction" theory when studying the use of various social software, which also reflects this from the side.

Voice social is obviously more in line with the audience's "emotional communication" needs than text social, which is why more and more voice-based social software has been available in recent years. Even in the text-only mediums with the poorest interactive cues, people can express emotions and intimacy, enjoy communication and establish social relationships, but this still does not affect their preference for more interactive mediums.

Today's digital media users are mostly young generations, who grew up in the rapid development of digital media, know the survival of the Internet, many of them refuse to pay attention to the boundaries of excessive intimacy, but also look forward to being able to get some emotional comfort in their lonely moments.

Xu is because of this, podcasts, listening to books and other sound media have been rapidly developed in recent years, do not need to see the face, will not be too intimate, but there is a voice to convey emotions, which is indeed in line with the psychology of many young people. What we also need to see is that media such as podcasts and listening books "have a variety of intelligent media attributes such as mobility, sociality, and artificial intelligence", especially for the audience of listening to books, "the user's audiobook use behavior has achieved the interaction between people and people, people and things, and people and the environment." ”[7]

Obviously, this means that the development of sound technology in digital media has further catered to the needs of scene communication.

Sound will return to the mainstream medium?

In fact, no matter how tired young people are of listening to each other's voices in the process of online socialization, one of the things that is happening is that after the decline of traditional broadcasting, audio is returning to the mainstream communication medium through social voice, network podcasts, car broadcasting, home intelligent voice and other ways.

From Levinson's "media evolution" theory, the law of media evolution lies in replicating the "pre-technical" or "human" communication environment in the real world. [8] Acoustic language and auditory communication are obviously an indispensable part of the context of "pre-technology communication", which also means that sound technology will have extremely important value in online new media and intelligent media.

Sound was once considered to have limitations such as uncertainty, fleeting, linear propagation, and limited information capacity, which also made the broadcasting of the past non-exclusive and concomitant. In the faster pace of society, these characteristics are becoming more and more advantageous: people have to deal with more and more diverse information, so the demand for communication media with compatible attributes is increasingly strong. And "the sound signal takes advantage of the 'edge' attention, and people only need to notice what is happening when an unusual sound sounds." Therefore, the notification of sound does not cause an undue burden – this becomes the essence of auditory communication." [9]

Yu Guoming and other scholars pointed out in the measurement of the user's perception effect of voice news that "'sound' will return to the mainstream medium in the future communication", and at the moment of the rapid development of network media and intelligent media, "sound, as the 'first entrance' of artificial intelligence technology in the media industry, will make the 'visual-based' civilization that has been invented in printing once again transform into an auditory center, and pull people back to the 'tribe' in the era of 'de-tribalization'." ”[10]

In recent years, with the development of AI technology, more and more families have begun to access intelligent voice services, from smart speakers to "AI synthetic news anchors", and sound has gradually become a daily intelligent interactive entrance.

5G technology and artificial intelligence have brought sound back to an extremely important position, and our social media are constantly trying to design more possibilities in voice transmission. This also shows that continuous advances in technology provide new media availability, which in turn affects the speed, interactivity, and accessibility of communication, thereby creating new social contexts and cultures.

Needless to say, technological developments have made our media environment more complex and placed us in a complex media environment, and when this environment becomes a communicationable scene, people may face new social challenges.

But from the perspective of the media itself, some types of media will be more suitable for certain types of relationships, and different people will also choose specific media according to their own needs and the characteristics of communicating with each other, in other words, no matter how advanced the technology is, the types of media and the use of various ways, it is ultimately ourselves that can determine the use and bias.

From the invention of the first generation of communication technology to the present, people will still be obsessed with thinking about the relationship between communication, communication, media and themselves, and then build more meaningful social relationships. Some people may worry that the media intermediaries in social networking will affect our face-to-face communication ability and affect our emotional connection with others; perhaps some people may think that new technologies and new media can allow us to break through the limitations of time and space and keep in touch with the people we care about. But we should pay attention to the fact that regardless of the technology itself, people can use adaptability and creativity to influence technology and use technology to achieve goals. Maybe sometimes some of our unlocking of the medium is a possibility that the designers have never thought about.

Back to the original question of the article, sending voice and text, behind it is never the question of who is right and who is wrong, the two are not binary opposites, everything lies in which intermediary communication method we want to use to establish a relationship with each other.

Reference Links:

Yao Jinsong. The Return and Transcendence of Interpersonal Communication in New Media: A Case Study of Instant Messaging Tool QQ[J].Contemporary Communication, 2006(6):53-55.

Du Zhihong. Mediated Oral Communication: The Mirror of Sound and the Bias of Time and Space:Based on the Investigation of WeChat Voice[J].Journal of Xuzhou Institute of Technology (Social Science Edition), 2018(4):91-94.

Dong Chenyu,Tang Yuezhe. Interaction and Imagination in Social Media, quoted from "Communication in the Cloud: Interpersonal Relationships in the Digital Age", Beijing: Chinese University Press, 2020:7.

[4] [6] [American] Nancy K. Byham.Communication in the Cloud: Interpersonal Relationships in the Digital Age[M].Dong Chenyu, Tang Yuezhe translation. Beijing:Chinese University Press,2020:7.]

[5] Shirley Turkel. Mass loneliness[M]. Zhou Kui,Liu Jingjing. Zhejiang People's Publishing House,2014:3.

Dai Yuanguang,Xia Yin. Levinson's Inheritance and Revision of McLuhan's Idea of Media Evolution: On Media Evolution and Theoretical Sources[J].International Press, 2010(4).

Jiang Zewei. Content, Form, Scene and Satisfaction: A Study on the User Use of Mobile New Media Audiobooks: Focusing on Mobile Applications "WeChat Reading" and "WeChat Listening"[J].Publishing Science, 2021(5):31-40.

2017-2018 China Online Audio Market Research Report.

https://www.iimedia.cn/c400/61111.html

[10] Yu Guoming, Wang Wenxuan, Feng Fei." "Sound" as an Insight Paradigm for The Mainstream Medium of Future Communication: A Case Study of User Perception Effect and Measurement of Voice News[J].Social Science Front, 2019(7):136-145+282.