You need to talk to someone. About something that matters. Without thinking much about it, you make a choice. You text. Or you pick up the phone. Or you wait until you can see them in person. Or you decide a voice memo will do. The decision feels like a logistics question — what’s easiest, what’s fastest, what fits the moment. It’s actually a choice about which conversation you’ll end up having, because each of those mediums permits and forbids different things. We don’t notice this because we treat them as interchangeable containers for the same thing.

“I’m taking material that is meant to be seen. And being told you have to make this work in audio — nobody’s going to see what you think — having to transform — it wasn’t story, it was words. So that the words were more specific.”

Scott Edward Smith is describing what happened when the pandemic pushed his stage work into audio drama. The play didn’t survive the transition intact. Whole categories of meaning — gesture, blocking, facial expression, what an actor can do with a long silent look — simply weren’t available anymore. He had to learn that the words now had to do everything the visuals had been carrying, which meant the words themselves had to change. He came out of the process with a much sharper awareness of which parts of “the story” had actually been doing the work, and which had been carried for free by the medium.

Most of us never go through that. We have our conversations in whichever medium is in front of us, and we don’t notice what we lost or gained by choosing it.

A phone call forbids eye contact and offers a peculiar kind of intimacy in exchange — you’re inside someone’s voice in their ear, without the pressure of being watched. The pacing is slower than text. There are pauses, and the pauses are doing work. You can hear when someone’s about to cry before they cry, and you can choose to act on it or not. Things get said on a phone call that wouldn’t be said in person — partly because of the anonymity of voice-only, partly because the medium doesn’t let you check on the other person’s face for permission first.

Text forbids prosody and timing. It also forbids the immediate course-correction that lets in-person conversation recover from a misstep. But it allows things no other medium allows: you can revise before sending. You can stop mid-sentence and delete the whole thing. You can carry the conversation around with you across hours or days, returning to a message during a break and answering it from a different mood than the one you received it in. The archive is itself a feature — you can scroll back and check what was said, which is impossible in any spoken medium. Text holds. It’s the only conversational medium that does.

Video adds eyes but flattens the body. You can see someone’s face, but you can’t read their full posture, and you can’t tell whether they’re looking at you or at their own thumbnail in the corner. Video conversations end up with a particular brittleness — the eye contact is performative because of how the camera angle works, the silences are awkward because they reveal lag rather than thinking, and the body is mostly missing below the shoulders. It’s a strange medium, half present and half not, and most of us never notice what it specifically removes.

In-person allows everything but requires presence. That’s the trade. You get gesture, posture, micro-expressions, the option to touch someone’s arm, the option to walk away in the same physical space. You also lose all the features of the other mediums: no editing, no archive, no protection from the immediate response of the other person’s face. In-person is rich and dangerous in a way none of the others are.

Voice memo is its own thing — voice without timing pressure. You record, you listen back if you want, you re-record if you don’t like what you said. The recipient also chooses when to engage. Voice memos are letters that sound like conversation, or conversations that behave like letters, depending on how you use them.

Listing these out is unfair to the experience of being inside them, which is that they don’t feel like different mediums. They feel like “just talking.” But Smith’s realization — that the medium isn’t a neutral conveyance, that it actively shapes what can be said — applies just as much to ordinary conversation as it does to theater going to audio. When you text someone instead of calling them, you’ve made a quiet choice about which sentences can exist and which can’t. When you choose a phone call over a video call, you’ve decided that some kinds of honesty are easier when no one is being looked at. When you ask to meet in person, you’ve decided that whatever this is, it needs the friction the other mediums smooth away.

The medium chooses itself, based on what’s nearest at hand. Which means that often, the conversation we end up having is the one the medium permitted, not the one we actually needed. The hard conversation got texted, and the texted version was thinner than the spoken version would have been, and we didn’t notice because we’d never had the spoken version to compare it to.

Sometimes you can feel a medium failing in real time. You’re in a text exchange and you suddenly think “I need to call you” — that’s a recognition that the conversation has run up against what text can hold. The reverse also happens: you’re on the phone and someone says “can I just text this to you?” because the medium is too immediate, and they need the editing time. The shift signals a medium-conversation mismatch — the conversation needed something the current medium can’t provide. Most mismatches don’t get fixed this way. They just produce slightly worse conversations, and we attribute the worseness to the other person, or to ourselves, or to the topic, rather than to the room we chose to have it in.

There may be conversations that are actually impossible in some mediums. Some things can only be said when someone is in front of you, because saying them requires you to commit to the response you can see on their face. Some things can only be said over text, because saying them out loud would require a tone you don’t have. Some things can only be said on the phone, because they need voice but not the visual accountability of a face. The conversation we never had with someone may simply be the one we tried to have in the wrong room.

The medium is doing more than we think. The conversations in our lives are not floating free of the rooms we hold them in. The room is part of the conversation. Most of the time, we pick the room without realizing we’re picking the conversation. Most of the time, we don’t even know we made a choice.

This field note references the Podtalk episode “Audio Drama with Scott Edward Smith,” published February 15, 2024.

This work was produced using AI language models directed through an editorial system designed by Craig Constantine. The author selected all source material, designed the creative framework, directed the editorial process, and made all acceptance and revision decisions. The prose was generated by AI under sustained human editorial direction.