There is a joke in the first season of the HBO show Hacks, pitched by Hannah Einbinder’s gen Z character, Ava, to her boomer employer, Deborah Vance: “I had a horrible nightmare that I got a voicemail,” she says. Ha – gen Z hates voicemail; boomers don’t understand jokes without punchlines. “What?” shrieks Jean Smart’s Vance. Ha – everyone’s disgusting, and no single generation will give an inch to another.
Sorry to insert gen X into the mix, but in the context of this particular flashpoint, we need to talk about voice memos. (Or audio messages, or voice texts, not to be confused with voice-to-text, which is something else entirely – all right, Grandma?)
It started, for me, a few years ago, with friends leaving voice memos because they were driving and couldn’t respond to texts in the conventional way. This was annoying but OK because it was a safety consideration. As time went on, the goalposts changed. Audio messages started showing up in other contexts, often opening with the semi-apology of “can’t be arsed to type”, or a sheepish plea for understanding because someone’s hands were full. The pretext was........