Laments about WhatsApp and Signal voice messages: an illustration of insular Global North narratives

A few days ago, an electrician arrived at my house to investigate a disruption in power supply. During the course of his work, he whipped out his phone a few times and sent WhatsApp voice messages. He received replies as voice messages, which helped him to sort out the problem.

I have seen this over and over again. Electricians, plumbers, carpenters, flex board manufacturers, and workers of their ilk in India do not write WhatsApp messages—neither in English, nor in Hindi or Bengali or any other Indian language. Often, they simply call. And as often, they send WhatsApp voice messages. They do this not just with colleagues, but also with customers/clients. And they reply with a voice message even if the customer/client sends them a text message in whatever language.

Why do they do this? And does the media narrative about voice messages represent their reasons?

Before we get to possible reasons, let us look at the laments about voice messages appearing in newspaper articles, blogs, and community forums. Here's a writer and journalist raging that they are a crime against humanity; that a voice message is simply a long, tedious, self-indulgent monologue assaulting the receiver's auditory system (and brain). This Verge article—itself written in defence of voice messages—lists several pieces ranting about the ills of this trend. Most of the articles arguing against voice messages—and there seem to be a hell of a lot of them in Western outlets—boil down to few simple points.

• While it is easier and faster for a sender to speak out a message than to type it, listening to a message is tedious and time-consuming for the receiver as compared to simply reading text; hence it is a selfish and disrespectful action on the part of the sender
• It is awkward, if not impossible, to hear out messages in a public place or in a workplace
• The receiver can't use search to look for a specific part of a voice message, so has to listen to the entire message even for finding a single term or phrase

As of this writing, a demand for an ability to selectively block / disallow voice messages in the Signal messaging app has 120 argumentative posts spanning over three and a half years. Despite a Signal developer rejecting the demand, the thread is still unraveling, with people sometimes using weird analogies, and then arguing for days over that analogy. As an amusing example, consider this argument:

"...I would become angry soon if suddenly people would start visiting me at home and knock on my door just because they knew my home address and they preferred to talk face-to-face with me everytime instead of just calling or messaging me."

Weird analogies notwithstanding, some of the arguments against voice messages are not incorrect, at least in the context of specific social settings. The complainant assumes that there are unspoken social norms, and is outraged that they are violated. The rising popularity of voice messages in the USA itself suggests that those assumptions may be incorrect.

But here's the thing: these assumed norms, incorrect or not, are entirely centered on the USA, and maybe parts of Canada and Western Europe. There is neither understanding nor acknowledgment that these norms may not apply to most of the world. And since the people from the global south do not speak directly in these fora, their voices and opinions do not exist, for the readers or consumers of these fora. 

(Until 2020, I hardly ever came across coverage of voice messages in Indian media in English or in other languages. The Indian media started talking about this topic only after their Western counterparts started bleating about it during the COVID era. This is one more among countless examples of the global reach of American soft power.) 

Sadly, the media content appearing in defence of voice messages is equally vacuous and unconnected with the genuine needs of the majority. The Verge article I mentioned earlier talks about the intimacy of voice messages (voice can convey warmth and emotions and tones, text cannot), and tries to formalize etiquette for this form of communication. A piece in The Guardian suggests that voice notes enable women to speak in the same way men do, without fear of being cut off. It wonders if voice notes will kill the phone call. Another piece that appeared in the same outlet one and a half years after the first one has nothing relevant to say.

What are these pieces missing?

Let's get back to Indians who avoid text messaging and rely exclusively on calls or on voice messages. For any Indian not blinkered with prejudices and biases, the reasons why they do this are easy to work out. (And if you cannot, chatting with a broad cross-section of people will enlighten you in no time.)

1. Most Indians do not know English, despite impressions to the contrary.
2. Even if they do know a few English words, they hardly know the Latin script.
3. Even if they are familiar with the Latin script, they cannot use it to spell words or compose sentences.
4. All of the above makes it impossible for them to compose text messages in English.
5. For the same reasons, they find it very hard to use the Latin script to compose messages in Bengali or Kannada or Marathi.
6. Gboard and some other smartphone keyboards do support scripts other than Latin. But modern computing hardware and software primarily developed in the Latin script. So using other scripts is extremely time-consuming and error-prone. I know because I have done this enough number of times. If you are familiar with the Devanagari script (and are a masochist), try typing, for example, Dhrishtadyumna (धृष्टद्युम्न), in both Latin and Devanagari scripts, and compare the times required.
7. And one need not assume that the user is necessarily well-versed in Devanagari or Odiya script.
8. That India has approximately thirty official languages and close to a thousand languages overall compounds the problem.
   

So... for an overwhelmingly large number of Indian users, voice messages are a vital necessity. No other country has India's linguistic diversity, but to a lesser extent, these reasons apply to users from most of the countries in the global south.

However, these criteria hardly ever appear in media articles or blog posts, despite WhatsApp officials themselves telling the media all the way back in 2013 that "certain languages" were "very difficult to type". In a casual Google search, I found only this piece in the Vox acknowledging that voice messages have been popular outside of the USA since they were introduced in 2013, that they make it easier for people to communicate in languages that are hard to type, that Americans too use voice messages to overcome language barriers. And this article appeared only in 2023, ten years after WhatsApp introduced the feature.

Fortunately, WhatsApp spread throughout the global south much before it made inroads in the USA and other global north countries. So it had to prioritize demands of global south users. And the market dominance of WhatsApp forced every challenger app to also incorporate these features, thank heavens!

It is infuriating, but not surprising that the narrative on the design and evolution of vital services and infrastructures completely misses the requirements of over eighty percent of the world population. Imperial and colonial structures ensure that the global north dominates the discourse about political and economic organization of all societies across the world. What we discussed is a relatively insignificant illustration of this larger context.

Now consider this: to a first approximation, the entire world uses American software and Chinese hardware. In today's world of rival geopolitical camps, this simple fact is an inflammable element waiting to ignite. But that's a topic for another day.