It may be a bit old fashioned, but the pandemic has reminded me of how much I love voicemail.
While the telephone was invented in 1876, it took 50 odd years for the answering machine to appear in a primitive form, and another 25 after that for the digital separation of messages from physical devices. Over the next half century, voicemail spread into every corner our lives, tying friends and family to one another as easily as business and industry, but for most people around the world today, the text message is the preferred mode of communication. It's cheaper and has the potential to be directed at many simultaneous recipients via group chats. It's quicker to skim, disregard or respond to as needed. It's easier to justify as an interruption and ostensibly less invasive, but as increasingly more of our lives take place online in the palms of our hands, a text is just another alert mixed with notifications from our calendars, apps and advertisements.
Don’t get me wrong. A handwritten letter is still the paramount of communication. The permanence of emotion flowing from the page at a distance of days, months or years never ceases to amaze me. Perhaps though, growing up in the eighties with memories of long phone calls between friends, and parents who refused to employ an answering machine, the novelty of voicemail never quite wore off. The background noise from a busy street corner in a missed connection fills my imagination with romance. And those people who know me best, who know I rarely ever carried a phone until I became a father, know that I have saved some messages for years.
Maybe it’s because of those scenes in movies where a lover plays back the last recording of their long lost partner. Or it could just be the nostalgic nature of sound, the reason why we all love great songs as much as we do, the empathic power of repetition to turn any noise into music after enough playback. I can’t be certain, but it could simply be a longing for the human touch, instead of the chilling sharpness of the screen.
I’ve never been a big fan of mobile phones. My dad was always on call, being pulled away from family gatherings and special events, so the idea of being reachable at all times fills me with dread. The sound of his pager is etched into my memory, and though it took me many years to understand the larger good created by those piercing interruptions, I can’t abide it as behavior adopted by the world at large. Leaving aside all the magic tricks modern phones seem capable of performing, it's important to remember that the privilege to disconnect is hard fought.
For many folks these days, an actual phone call seems quite foreign unless it’s from scammer or a telemarketer. My most recent iPhone actually refuses calls from anyone who I haven’t had previous contact with, but so few strangers leave messages, I tend to feel relieved for the filtering service. Much like a covert note stuck into a forgotten pocket, or a picture tucked away in a book, a voicemail from long ago is a sort of time capsule. The human voice is a revelation of intimate detail. Tension and ease, joy and sorrow, nervousness and calm are all betrayed in the shortest of speech. In our current day, do we default to the anonymity of digital text because we seek to hide our emotions? Or have we simply forgotten how the tone and timber of real talk can be a salve for all that ails you?