Why does replying to texts feel like a full time job?

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SPEAKER_3 (1:00)

The Hard Shoulder with Ciara Kelly and Shane Colman on Newstalk with Kiya.

Ciara Kelly (1:09)

Are you snowed under by WhatsApp messages, group chats, voice notes, and can you cope with them all? Henry McKeen has been out and about and I was asking people.

Henry McKeen (1:20)

Do you get too many text messages, too many WhatsApp voice notes?

SPEAKER_6 (1:24)

I'd say yeah, probably. I definitely do, especially from my younger friends and not necessarily my parents. They kind of don't like it when I'd send a voice note, but just from my friends, yeah, definitely.

Henry McKeen (1:36)

How long is your average voice note? How many minutes would you leave?

SPEAKER_6 (1:40)

If I was like voice noting like my really good friends, probably like a couple of minutes. It can be annoying, especially on WhatsApp, because you have to click on to the message and it will say you've read it and everything. And then you feel the pressure to respond, especially to voice notes, because they can see if you've listened to it or not. But I'd kind of just say I feel like it can be fine, but sometimes in certain situations, it can be a bit much.

Henry McKeen (2:03)

Do you send multiple short messages or one long text?

SPEAKER_7 (2:07)

It's like an important situation. I'd say I would probably send a long paragraph, but if it's just like not too important, I think I'd send like small texts.

Henry McKeen (2:16)

How many WhatsApp groups are you in?

SPEAKER_7 (2:19)

I'd like to say quite a lot. Our generation, it's more Snapchat than WhatsApp. Oh, like loads. I can't even count.

Henry McKeen (2:25)

Like more than 20

SPEAKER_7 (2:26)

Probably.

SPEAKER_8 (2:26)

So instead of a message now, it's they're talking and then if you're sitting beside someone, you're afraid to click into it because you don't know what they're gonna say in the message.

SPEAKER_9 (2:33)

You know, the voice notes, the voice notes, they're a bit much, yeah. So if you click in and you don't know what the person's gonna say, to be honest with you, I think a lot of social media is getting way too much.

Henry McKeen (2:45)

Too much.

SPEAKER_9 (2:45)

Way too much, mate. I think some of the social media should be banned.

Henry McKeen (2:50)

Okay.

Ciara Kelly (2:51)

I think a lot of people might agree. And that was Henry McKean out asking about voice notes there. And Kelly, early columnist at The Journal and co-host of the For Tech's Sake podcast, has been writing about this and she joins us. Now, Kelly, you made the point that years ago, first of all, and I'd forgotten this entirely, we were limited even in terms of the numbers of characters we could put into a text message and also charged for text messages. So we were a bit more judicious about sending them, and now it is pretty much a free-for-all.

Kelly Earley (3:22)

That's right. Yeah. I remember when I was younger, and you'll see this on the RTR close and stuff, there were segments on all of the broadcasters in the country, about the introduction of text speak and all these acronyms and smiley faces and what they meant and everything, because people had so little characters to communicate in. It was 160 characters, including spaces.

So that's like far less than a tweet even. And yeah, we were paying nine cent a message. And if someone was abroad, it was 25 cents. So I think people forget that it was once like that. And now WhatsApp, there's no limit, like Facebook Messenger, Instagram DMs. There's just no limit. And I think we've lost the run of ourselves and we just need to restore the balance of this thing.