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In the Sunday Blog post “Not Your Daddy’s Pandemic: Touchless Social”, I brought up this novel concept of getting the most out of social media without staring at our phones. I ground this idea in the reasons why people tend to use social media, and how audio can accomplish those same things (connection with others, entertainment, news, etc.).
It’s only natural then to ask the question: can audio replace visuals in social media?
As I’ve hit on previously, social media apps tend to fall into at least one of these modes of communication: text, image, audio, and video. The odd one out is audio because that’s the one that depends on our ears instead of our eyes. It is also the least common driving force for social platforms.
Over 20 years into the age of social media, you might contend that if audio-based platforms haven’t caught on at this point, it doesn’t add anything the other modes can’t. To that, I’d say that video, which is arguably now the most common, wasn’t nearly as active 5-7 years ago. So can audio eventually carve out a purpose, and if so, what is that purpose?
You guessed it. The same purposes for which we use social media. Connecting with others, being entertained, keeping up with the news, and more are all use cases for social audio. But why audio over video? Why audio over text? In my eyes, all these modes lie on a spectrum.
On one end, you have text. Text is quick and accessible. But what it has in ease, it lacks in emotion and intimacy.
On the other end, you have video. Video is immersive and engaging, giving the viewer access to your surroundings. But this immersion comes at the cost of invasiveness and time. Time in the sense that making a video takes longer than another mode. Invasive in the sense that viewers can see you and your surroundings.
Lying in the middle of this spectrum is audio. Audio is quick, though perhaps not as quick as text. Audio is engaging, though perhaps not as engaging as video. But audio doesn’t lack intimacy like text, and it doesn’t take as much time or invade your privacy like video.
Even as apps have evolved from sharing text blurbs to sharing photos to sharing video, our reasons for using these apps haven’t changed. So when all forms can accomplish the goals of social media in various ways and to various degrees, the distinction comes down to the users. Audio is but another tool for being social online.
Tuesday Deep Dive is a series where we discuss in more detail a specific point made in the previous Sunday Blog.