A society is impossible without conversation. So why have we made it so hard to have one?
Throughout human history we have spoken with one another. From grunts and gestures two million years ago, to the primal languages of our cognitive revolution, to Latin, to Chinese, to English. Discussion is how we figure out what we want to do with our time, who should lead us, what we believe, what things mean. If thinking is figuring things out within one's head, discussion is figuring things out together. We are underpinned by it.
Communication capacity determines the scale of a society. As Benedict Anderson argued in Imagined Communities, the modern nation is only possible through distributed media. Society's reach has become as wide as the devices we hold.
The keyboard problem.
One of the unspoken challenges of the 21st century is the shift in the medium itself. SMS, then the iPhone keyboard, then every app on it. Today people spend over five hours a day on their phones, and roughly 70% of waking life communicating. The keyboard has quietly become the default way humans relate to each other.
And the keyboard does not carry the human experience. It informs, but it does not convey emotion. Emotion is the thing we all share. It is the bond beneath marriages, friendships, families, neighbourhoods. "I love you" is not "I think about you." It is felt, not typed.
When the medium strips emotion away, we stop interacting with who someone is and start interacting with who we imagine them to be. We are, in effect, texting imaginary friends. The narrative is that we have never been more connected. We have. Just not to each other.
Our interpersonal ancient bedrock, the thing society sits on, needs to be translated to modern technology so that society can continue.
Why not the alternatives?
Calls interrupt. Video calls demand we be ready, made up, presentable. Texting wins because it is asynchronous, slotting into the small gaps of a day. The answer cannot be a return to the old forms. It has to meet people in the moments they actually have.
Audio carries tone. Audio carries feeling. Voice messages already exist, but they have been built as an attachment to the keyboard, another piece of media inside a text thread. They should be the conversation, not a footnote to it.
What a real conversation looks like.
In life, you respond when you are spoken to. A second to gather your thoughts, then you reply. So why shouldn't the app start recording the moment you finish listening? Why shouldn't a friend's face sit behind their voice, the way it does across a table? Why shouldn't past conversations be kept, so we can return to them, remember, and understand each other better?
The opportunity is to combine the authenticity of real conversation with the memory of technology. To build a medium where speaking from afar makes us better at speaking when we are together. Better family members, neighbours, friends, colleagues, citizens.
This is not an imaginary medium. This is Yatter.
Now we're talking.
