The Medium is the Mask

Why does talking to one another feel like a part-time job?

We are in the day and age of instant messaging and thus instant connection. Even more so, we are in the day and age of now preferring to outsource messages via LLMs where emails, content copy, and even longer correspondence takes only a prompt and a copy/paste. I am guilty of all of the above.

But how does all of this happen? Perhaps we should start at the beginning. I’ve come to regard the modern modes of communication in the image of a ladder. The first rung seems to be the text message. Abrupt, quick, succinct. The regular text message is over the moment it’s received. Our eyes do a quick scan and then we put together the main message. How are you? Did you water the balcony plants? What was the name of that movie we saw last month? Messages such as these feel like light drops of rain. But these messages can be filled with reminiscing, exchanging emojis, or heated arguments. Drop, drop, drop. Almost so small that it can’t hurt you, but how easily it can. Ideal for quick information but it's a medium of distance, and grander ideas tend to fall flat inside it.

There’s an amount of pressure in this bottom rung even though it should in theory be the one with the most distance and thus more safety. Strange enough, it was weeks after ChatGPT became a household name that we were all joking about how we used it to send the emails we didn’t want to write up. One close friend revealed how she fed her and her feuding partner's chat history to AI in hopes it could formulate a message that could bring them back together. I nodded along, knowing I had done something similar with messages from my sister because I too felt that a machine was better equipped to zoom out of the emotional hellfire we had found ourselves in. We both sent those generated messages with a feeling of relief.

Thankfully, there is not yet a way for the average person to outsource voice messages (often a loved or hated medium). Full disclosure: I am an avid voice message sender much to the chagrin of my long distance friends. I easily go on 10 minute rants about an experience that spanned maybe two minutes. I try in earnest to use my single source of audio to describe flippant hand gestures of counterparts and the vibrating bass at the rock concert and the smell of rosebushes when lost in a cemetery. Despite my efforts, the story comes out somewhat fumbled.

The long form voice message is a dying art because it asks for more of us. And I understand this because when I see on my notifications a voice message, even if it’s a short 20 second (you couldn’t have written it out?) or a 5 minute (you’ve given me a whole novel to respond to) message, I feel almost always a sense of immediate and brief annoyance. It’s not that I feel that I’ve flown above some exclusionary line, either. I’m sure many of my friends experience a temporary pang of annoyance once seeing that cursed microphone icon and the time length from me.

But why am I annoyed? It’s almost like a reaction that I cannot control, like someone has spilled something on me and now it’s my job to clean it up. In a way, that’s probably the heart of the issue: I am being pulled out of my day to now deal with something that someone has sprung upon me. Sure, not every voice message contains devastating news or a spontaneous confession or emotional punch. But it could. Unlike the soft pitter patter of text messages dropping like rain, unheard voice messages can feel like stepping in a minefield. We have no clue what we’re about to hear, what we may feel upon that message, and what we must do after. So that’s most likely the annoyance with voice messages–their possibility to turn us around without predicting the outcome beforehand.

Calling is the next level up. It’s the real time exchange of voice messages. Picking up the phone and dialing someone’s number has its own emotional experience. My generation felt like one of the first that became afraid of answering the phone. Perhaps because we learned that phone calls are rarely spontaneous. You cannot receive one without concern that something serious in nature has happened: the doctor’s office calling back about the results, your boss asking you to work an extra shift, a hospital informing you of a family member’s condition. I want to pull up the covers just thinking about these scenarios.

Sure, there’s protection in the distance created by the lack of seeing each other. No one has to hold my hand and console me when misfortune calls. In turn, I am free to pound my fist against a wall without disturbing the other party. It’s not all bad though. There can be a closer feeling of connection from being in the same moment of time with someone even if you both are halfway across the world and can’t see each other. I feel this when I call my closest friends and they apologize that it may be loud in the background because they’re cooking dinner. Meanwhile I am painting my toenails or reorganizing my bookshelf. Even if we appear to be alert by „hm“’s and followup questions, we don't physically signal that we're fully absorbed in what the other person is saying. This is the main medium that my father and I communicate. We tend to do well with this balance of simultaneous hidden connection. I must not change out of my pajamas and he must not pretend to hide his secret cigarette.

Now we go one step higher to video calling which was the main source of contact for many people during the COVID pandemic. The closest thing we have to synchronous conversation in person without being in person. Ah, finally we can see facial expressions and gestures and even catch the background of the person. An upgrade for our storytelling capabilities and intimacy. Yet isn’t it strange how satisfying it is to shut the laptop as soon as the video conference ends? That deep sigh of relief we take afterwards? We’re only one step away from the golden cup of in-person conversation. Why does it have a sense of dread attached?

Even before working from home became the norm, workplaces all around the globe employed this mode of communication internally and externally. It combined the best of both worlds: I could be reached anywhere and be seen and heard all with the click of a mouse. If you’ve worked in an office, then you’ve heard the now commonplace joke: this meeting could’ve been an email. And now this email could’ve been written by ChatGPT.

If we step back, video calling is a medium that connects in a way that has never been possible before. Before my grandfather died, he told me he felt gratitude to experience the days where he could call someone and see their face in real time. It was something of a childhood dream for him, even if he never managed to give himself a flattering angle or to flip the camera around to show what he had cooked up that evening.

Let’s conclude the ladder with in person communication. Crème de la crème. We finally meet and suddenly all gestures and facial expressions and tonal shifts and energy can be exchanged. There can be a pat on the arm or a communal laughing fit. Among good friends, this can be a restorative experience. However with strangers or those who we’d rather not be around, this can be draining. The more we attempt to hold our cool or hold a conversation, the more energy it costs. The stakes are simply higher than other mediums. We present ourselves as witnessing, taking in information, present, but then also we are expressing our own concerns, comments, gesticulations, all while consciously or subconsciously trying to follow the rules of society and language shared.

Yes, McLuhan, the medium is the message. I would add that the medium is the mask we put on. In other words, the time and energy we invest. I’d like to point to Goffman here. In his seminal work The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), he explains that with each social interaction, we are performing a certain role expected of us for an audience. We come onstage, we act, we put on different fronts and try to manage impressions of other selves. To me, it feels much akin to tediously fixing on a mask before the play. The more the audience expects of us, the more work we are expected to put in.

We’re constantly juggling our different layers of our masks as we sit in a Zoom call while messaging a friend about weekend plans and the door rings from a delivery person. Our hypnotic rectangles can easily buzz 100+ in a day. How do we manage it all? So it makes sense when we feel exhausted and lacking time even though communication should be more convenient. However we are bombarded with moments asking us to perform that these 16 waking hours can feel like a week.

This theory of mine has helped me understand myself and why it takes me weeks to respond to one message. I cannot perform that long; I am not good at switching masks. I think of the time my partner and I were waiting at the dentist and, when my name was called, I turned to say goodbye and shook his hand instead of kissing him.

I’ve admired those who can switch seamlessly. One evening hopping into a car, I decide to sit back and observe a master performer: the taxi driver. The driver, after finishing with our small talk, proceeds to switch to a phone call. This at first feels jarring. How could he want to talk to more people? Yet while we sit there, there’s no greeting on the phone. Minutes pass without any reaction from either. After some time, a voice will speak and go on a tangent in language I do not understand. The other party doesn’t appear to expect a response. I lean in closer to the dashboard and realize it’s not a live call, but a discord group call of 14 anonymous head icons.

Suddenly, it hits me that my ladder of communication and theory of mediums and masks have collapsed. Here, a group of people, presumably from different parts of the world, have found a medium to converse in a way that was brand new to me. The anonymous group phone call. It’s not about performing or being present, it seems rather to be about companionship whether one is driving a taxi through the city streets or running an errand. The pressure of a phone call evaporates. I am witnessing the improv scene on the open stage. At first glance, it seems to lack the depth of deep conversation offered by phone calls, but maybe it could offer us something more–a space to take the mask off.