Annual Review of Meeting Voice Change
The voice used in video meetings has diverged from the voice used in all other contexts. This is the annual documentation of that divergence.
The meeting starts at ten. By 10:04 she has heard herself say "absolutely" four times.
She does not use "absolutely" outside of meetings. She checked. She went back through messages, through voice notes, through two weeks of ordinary conversation with people she has known for years. The word does not appear. In the meeting it appears constantly, automatically, in response to statements that do not require it: scheduling confirmations, agenda items, someone noting that the recording has started.
This is the second year of documentation.
In the first year she noted the voice change with mild interest. The meeting voice was a professional register. Everyone had one. The meeting voice was clearer, slightly higher, more emphatic. It rose at the ends of statements that did not require rising. It compressed pauses. It said "great question" to questions that were adequate.
In the second year the distance has grown.
The meeting voice now navigates situations the in-person voice would have found uncomfortable. It declines things smoothly. It acknowledges problems without dwelling. It answers questions the in-person voice would pause to consider, producing full sentences at a pace suggesting no pause was required.
She wonders, not for the first time, which voice is doing the work.
The in-person voice makes slower decisions. It says "I'm not sure" and means it. It has pauses that serve no strategic purpose, that are simply the sound of thinking rather than the sound of thinking being performed. The meeting voice does not have these pauses. The meeting voice was optimized for a room and then, without reconfiguration, deployed in a different room, and then in no room at all, just a rectangle on a screen with a mute button and a little light that shows when the camera is on.
"Absolutely," she says, to something she will not remember.
The camera light goes off. She is quiet for a moment in a way the meeting voice would not permit. The in-person voice returns without announcement, the way it always does, and she sits with it until the next one starts.