Remembering the voice: Exploring information and sentiment in voicemail archival practices

Abstract

This study examines preservation of voicemail artifacts. Applying an exploratory approach through grounded theory, participants ( N = 52) from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk provided common reasons for retaining voicemail artifacts. Results highlighted why participants retained or deleted general and specific voicemails. Five categories,  past-focused, important, future-focused, sentimental, and neglectful, represented retaining reasons. The oldest and most important artifacts represented sentimental messages. Three categories, past-focused, technological affordance, and unremarkable or undesirable calls, represented reasons for deletion. Voicemails are paralleled to mass and interpersonal communication and implications make connections between information retention, temporality, and interpersonal memorialization. Findings indicate that asynchronous communication exchanges and relics, such as voicemails, offer linkages to and reverberations of old and emerging technologies.