Another feature that differs between voice and text is the conversational structure.
So spoken communication occurs turn by turn.
That is, that one person speaks, and
then the person who was the listener becomes the speaker.
[COUGH] And it works quite well, but there are occasionally errors in
which the participants get kind of tripped up and they speak at the same time.
But it's pretty rare and
there are remarkably good mechanisms in place to overcome simultaneous speech.
In texting, well, it is also turn by turn.
Each message is a turn.
There really is no analogue to simultaneous speech in texting,
although occasionally text message may arrive out of order, out of sequence,
but that's pretty rare.
So while they're both turn by turn,
the idea of stepping on the other person's toes is pretty unlikely in texting.
Another feature that really distinguishes texting and
voice communication is persistence.
So texting is persistent.
That is, one sends a text message and because it's visual it
doesn't go away unless the user deletes it.
It remains on the user's phone.
It also remains in the cloud, but that's a separate issue.
In voice communication the turns are ephemeral.
They go away once they're uttered.
Unless they're audio recorded, there's no record of what has been said.
So that's a big difference.
You can imagine that that might affect people's willingness to provide sensitive
information.
They might be reluctant to provide sensitive information if there's
a permanent record.
And another distinction between the two ways of communicating has to do with
nonverbal cues, such as what are sometimes called paralinguistic features,
like ums and uhs.
With voice, ums and uhs just come with the territory.
It's rich with respect to these paralinguistic cues.
With texting there's virtually none of this unless somebody
intentionally includes it.
So you can type into a text message, to communicate perhaps,
uncertainty about the rest of the message.
But short of that,
there's virtually no analogue to paralinguistic forms of speech.
And then a final attribute that's quite different between voice and
texting is the way multitasking occurs.
So there are types of multitasking with voice and text, but they're different.
So with voice it tends to be simultaneous, so one might be speaking on the phone
while cooking, kind of doing the two things in parallel.
At some deep internal level shifting between the tasks, but
really engaging in the two tasks at the same time.
But with texting it's pretty unlikely that one is both entering text
into a text message and doing another task.
But once a text message is sent, it's completely normal to
switch to another task between the time the text message is sent and
the time the user reads the reply to that text message.
So all kinds of, the rest of life takes place between text messages.
So it's really a task switching approach versus a simultaneous