It's Not A Small World Yet, But We're Getting There

Late-millenium visions of the internet as a primarily face-to-face medium have not yet come to pass. We tend to catch up with one another on social media with text, photographs, and non-live video, and we search with text or voice. Skype is not nearly as large a player as the telephone was. That being said, we do interface with non-local speakers quite a lot, primarily due to consumption of passive media such as movies, TV shows, and music. Though it might not look like we thought it would, there is more inter-culture auditory communication than there ever has been. I would guess that localized phonetic variation is decreasing as a result. This would no doubt have negative consequences, dissolving cultural bonds and nudging people towards the difficult task of forming an individual identity rather than a tribal one. However, the readings seem to give reason to believe that decreasing inter-community phonetic variation may make society more equitable by dampening phonetic stereotyping. To reiterate, this is not to claim that on balance, the dissolution of local phonetic uniqueness is a good thing.

The Social Weight of Spoken Words makes the case that our speech contributes to the manner in which we are implicitly filed into social categories. It references, for example, a study in which speakers with prestigious accents were better-remembered than their less-prestigiously-accented peers. Stereotyping effects are difficult to deal with, even for those who are hyper-vigilant. Part of the reason why is that speech is understood in a stereotyped way: if an Australian speaker were to suddenly speak like an American for a few syllables, even an American listener would find it difficult to understand. An interesting piece of evidence for this effect is presented in the first experiment of Voice-specific effects in semantic association, wherein word association tasks presented by two different speakers yielded significantly different associated words. If something as benign as one's voice can impact what that person makes you think of, then equality of opportunity will be difficult to come by. No amount of understanding can rewire our implicitly bias-prone hardware.

A potential solution (again, with drawbacks of its own) may be for there to be less systemic vocal variation. Condoleezza Rice and the sociophonetic construction of identity finds that the famous Secretary of State's speech has hardly a trace of her roots in Alabama, Colorado, and California. If we all speak with a similar 'internet' accent, then we may have less phonetic-based bias.