Social media has transformed our lives. Now it's easier than it's ever been to share videos of cats falling over, get into uncharacteristically aggressive arguments with complete strangers, and spread demented conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton causing autism by emailing pizza to pregnant women. Truly we live in a golden age of time wasting, procrastination, and general idiocy.
And in WeChat, we have China's soft power secret weapon, a mighty titan of an app which laughs in the face of Instagram, widdles on Whatsapp, snatches Facebook's favorite teddy bear and refuses to give it back. WeChat organizes our social lives, pays for our meals, it rolls up our socks in pairs and puts them away in the sock drawer.
Yet there is a slithering serpent in this virtual paradise, a weevil in our metaphorical cornflakes. I'm talking about the moment when you hear the joyous “bimbombim” sound, and snatch up your phone to see what hilarious sticker or invitation to a hip party is about to pop up. But instead, there is a barren speech bubble containing just three little lines.
Yes, I'm talking about voice messages. And I think we can all agree that people who send voice messages are literally worse than Hitler. After all, Hitler didn't send voice messages to his own people, did he?
With voice messages, there's always a second message underlying your interlocutor's barely audible mumbling. And that message is “My time is too important for me to bother spending a minute prodding at a screen to communicate in a manner convenient for you. Your time, on the other hand, is not important at all, so you won't mind stopping what you're doing, finding somewhere quiet and away from other people, turning up your phone to maximum, and playing my words over and over again until you can make out what I'm saying.”
Amid the perpetual background hubbub of Beijing, the voice message is an act of aggression, sand in your aural bed, fingernails down your spiritual chalkboard. I intend to fight back against this scourge, and I encourage you to do likewise. My weapon of choice is this app – because there's nothing funnier than the human voice pitch-shifted and speeded up. From now on, anyone sending me a voice message will receive a reply which sounds like a kitten possessed by a demon howling into a storm, to the accompaniment of a generic hip-hop backing. Each increasingly desperate request for clarification will be met with a more distorted response, until the messages sound like excerpts from Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music.
Of course, some might say that this will simply result in everybody bellowing at each other incoherently, like brontosauruses calling across a primeval swamp. But given the nature of most WeChat communication, this would probably be a distinct improvement.
Photo: ios-data-recover.com
It wasn't a slip of the tongue, Starlighter, it was an intentionally satirical article. Of course we edit and approve everything before publishing.
If you and the other commentors felt the headline went overboard then fine, everyone's entitled to their own opinion. But I didn't think it was offensive at all, and instead saw it as a cheeky reference to Sean Spicer being ignorant about WWII.
Well, I don't agree with you. Can't discredit tbj just because of one slip of tongue..How is an article that presumably had to go through some kind of editing and approval process a 'slip of the tongue'? You cannot tell me someone didn't question the title at least.
We aren't as angry as Erin Strong, but we do respect her opinion.However, we are now worrying about the standard of our own writing as it seems Erin has quite a high threshold to be lept over in order to impress.
On a different note, it is very fulfilling to see that the fine folk at True Run Media are using Laowai Pie to find inspiration for their articles. We have all felt very touched and gay in the office today about this. We have decided it is only fitting if we share the article in today's limelight in this comment section so that True Run Media and Laowai Pie can feel a huge and loving bond as they agree upon a mutual disgust for the infamous, day ruining, life ending, Earth shattering and inhumane THING that is taking over our lives, the voice message.
The Greatest Evil on the Internet: Voice messages：http://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/af-IIbBEl7L0HHUXQq2Qzw
Is everyone at True Run Media out of their fucking minds? Fuck you for making me give you a click in order to comment back to this non-satirical, poorly written, pile of digital shit. But this cannot be left as it is.
I know Godwin's Law is a thing, but to start your fucking topic at it is low. To use it as clickbait is low. To give Sean Spicer's 'holocaust center' comment any sort of pedestal is low. To say that something as innocuous and innoffensive as god damn sounds coming out of your cellphone is low. You don't even need to click on those message. You, as an actual conscious decision-making pile of slime can choose to ignore it, or tell x person you don't like it, or grow the fuck up about it.
LITERALLY ANYTHING ELSE IS WORSE THAN THIS DIGITAL QUIRK. And that is how you properly use the word literally.
Man, I used to tell people that writing for this brand was a bit of a laugh, but that it was also a fun, wild, exciting time that I enjoyed, and was proud of.
Not anymore.
