Back in the good old days, when home phones were still a thing, the future of communication was video conferencing.  We’d mastered being able to talk to each other over a distance, so obviously the next big thing would be to see each other when we talked, right?  Well, a funny thing happened. 

As we moved towards that technology, a new communication method emerged and begin to encroach on telephony; the instant messenger.  No longer did you have to communicate in real-time, instead you could be impersonal and lazy and hide behind your device.  Instead of moving forward towards a more in-your-face reality (literally), chatting became the norm.  Which of course made video calling, once the technology was available, basically a moot point.  Why be more personal and immediate when this amazing impersonal text time machine exists?

I only bring this up because I’m diong an interview for work right now (or I was when I began writing this) and I am using Skype, but just for the audio portion.  I don’t really want to be seen or see the other side.  Skype, Facetime, etc. are the culmination of the dream we had as kids about video calls and telepresence, but our dreams changed at some point and now it seems more like a joke of a technology.  Of course, now our dreams have moved on to ‘holograms’ and other sci-fi stuff, but I’m sure some low-tech replacement can replace that too.