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It's been almost fifteen years since Skype introduced video calls and nearly nine years since FaceTime popularized the mobile version – so it's time to come back to one of the best-known modern predictions about mobile phones. video calls and determine exactly what went wrong.
The prediction comes from the 1996 epic of David Foster Wallace Infinite jokewho imagines a future in which the overabundance of information and corporatization have ravaged human consciousness. There are many surrealist predictions, with the videophone bit making about 150 pages. Infinite joke The calendar, the video call boom lasted a little over a year, collapsed with dire economic consequences and the majority of the population returned to the ordinary phone. Technically, this part is capitalized for strange stylistic reasons (everything is in title?), But I reduced it to save your eyes:
In 16 months or 5 quarters, the tumescent demand curve collapsed like a kicking tent, so that in the Year of Dependence, less than 10% of all private telephone calls used fiber optic data from video images … the average of the United States. phone user deciding that he / she actually preferred the old voice phone interface in the low technology and retrograde days of Bell, after all.
According to Foster Wallace, the problem lies in the fact that video calls make people aware of how each party is engaged in the conversation, which fundamentally changes the social implications of a call. As he says:
The audio-only phone conversations allowed you to assume that the person on the other end was paying full attention to you, while allowing you to not have to pay anything to observe it completely … Videophony made the fantasy unbearable.
You are also concerned about the appearance of the video call. So, even if you can get out of bed and take a regular audio call, the basic requirements of vanity are much stricter for video. This leads to a tangent on HD masking, which for some reason involves a physical plastic mask on your face hanging next to the phone. These masks turn into more appealing versions of the caller ("stronger chins, smaller eyeballs, scars and wrinkles in the airbrush"), ultimately ultimately replacing the physical form of the caller, until the disjunction between our real bodies and the online presentation becomes untenable, which leads to collapse.
Of course, there is a lot going on here about self-presentation and alienation, etc., but it articulates it all in a rather specific prediction of technology:
This is a kind of revealing lesson from the long-term viability curve of advances in consumer technology … First, there is some kind of tremendous progress in science fiction in mainstream technology – like the audio telephony to video telephony – which always advances, however. , presents some unexpected inconveniences for the consumer; and then, but the market niches created by these disadvantages … are ingeniously fulfilled by an entrepreneurial threshold; And yet, the very benefits of these ingenious offsets all too often seem to undermine the advancement of high technology.
He wrote all this before the Internet reached its pace, so I do not want to be too harsh, but that's really not what happened. The most missing piece is texting, which has almost completely overtaken voice calls for the rough reasons described by Foster Wallace. Not only do you not need to be careful or be handsome, you do not even need to be consciously present at the same time as the person you are talking to. The reading receipt is our only best technical mechanism for knowing if a person is on the other side of the world, and is perceived as invasive to the point of being rude.
At the same time, the easy distance of text messages has undoubtedly made video calls more important. FaceTime allows you to get out of the world of texting in an attentive and uncomfortable intimacy. Sometimes it's exactly what you need. It has become a central part of almost all smartphones and mobile platforms, even without going through parallel formats such as Snapchat and Instagram Stories, which are essentially atomized video calls on shareable media. There are a lot of animations that filter the faces (again, mainly for the reasons of vanity that Foster Wallace talks about), but they make you look like a cartoon dog or a CGI alien instead of 39, a more attractive version of yourself, so there is no future-shock alienation to bring the whole system down.
There is still something strangely familiar to work here, especially in the idea of endless technological cycles trying to repair what had been broken by the previous cycle. We create apps to distract ourselves, then more apps to help us focus. But sometimes we actually make systems that bring us together, and texting is a good example. Fortunately, the filters for the face are not as soul-destroying as they seemed.
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