Word: skype
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...here in Los Angeles on my videophone looking at my new editor in her formfitting silver bodysuit as she yelled at me from New York for sexually harassing her in the first sentence of the first column we worked on together. But even though we both have Skype, we haven't used it once. In fact, even though Skype is the only one of all the cool gadgets that cartoons promised me would exist by 2010, people don't seem nearly as excited as they should be. Only 34% of Skype calls even use video. And when Skype announced...
...used Skype twice: to be a guest expert on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and to let my mother see her grandson. Both involved a lot of help from tech people and drool. Yes, I find Meredith Vieira that attractive. But I haven't used it since. That's because Skype breaks the century-old social contract of the phone: we pay close attention while we're talking and zone out while...
...Skype requires me to look at you while you're talking, which is totally ridiculous. The only sci-fi show that understood this was Star Trek. Bones and Jim would use their flip phones to talk quickly about beaming or health issues. The only time they'd fire up the videophone was when a Klingon was sitting in a spaceship 20 yards away with guns pointed at them. Even then I think Sulu was checking out Go Fug Yourself. (See the top 10 gadgets...
Interested in talking more about my theory, I used my landline to call Sherry Turkle, an MIT professor of the social studies of science and technology. She told me people are not only uninterested in Skype, we're also not interested in talking on the regular phone. We want to TiVo our lives, avoiding real time by texting or e-mailing people when we feel like it. "Skype, which was the fantasy of our childhood, gets you back to sitting there and being available in that old-fashioned way. Our model of what it was to be present to each...
...full-contact listening that Skype requires, I don't think we want that all that often from people who aren't already in our house. The fact is, we don't really want to see other people that badly. That's why it's so difficult to make plans with them. That, plus texting times and places back and forth takes forever...