Linkology: The Best of the Internet for 6/10/11
So I have an iPhone 4, and it’s easily the best computer (yes, computer) I’ve ever used. I love it. But today I’m going to absolutely eviscerate its video calling feature, named FaceTime, because I think video calling is nonsense and after you try it once or twice just to experience it, you come to hate it because it’s way, way more than you bargained for. Sort of like the time you bought wet burritos from a street food vendor just to show how authentic you are and spent the next three days strapped to a toilet and sweating like a gallon of milk on an August sidewalk.
A note to the Apple fanboy nerd counterstrike that’s mounting: All video calling stinks, not just the iPhone’s. The idea of video calling in and of itself is deeply flawed, and if it ever got to be the de facto mode of telephonic communication I’d buy a third hand, surgically attach it to my chest, and strangle myself in a lonely men’s room before I ever succumbed to video calling. I mean it.
David Foster Walace is my favorite author. In his book Infinite Jest, which everyone should literally dedicate this summer to reading, he perfectly explains why video calling is a nuisance. I’m going to cut-and-paste his words here, ripped right from pps 144-151, much to the chagrin of certain colleages of mine who don’t appreciate my affinity for Wallace’s writing. (Which is because they have no soul.)
Wallace says that video calling fails on two angles: stress and vanity. Both are valid, and it takes about two video calls — not the experimental ones where you want to play with it just to see how it goes — but real ones, the ones that interrupt you from brushing your teeth or taking videos of your brain-damaged cat chewing on a faucet knob to really impress upon you how dumb video calling is.
Here’s Wallace on the stress angle:
Good old traditional audio-only phone conversations allowed you to presume that the person on the other end was paying complete attention to you while also permitting you not to have to pay anything even close to complete attention to her. A traditional aural-only conversation […] let you enter a kind of highway-hypnotic semi-attentive fugue: while conversing, you could look around the room, doodle, fine-groom, peel tiny bits of dead skin away from your cuticles, compose phone-pad haiku, stir things on the stove; you could even carry on a whole separate additional sign-language-and-exaggerated-facial-expression type of conversation with people right there in the room with you, all while seeming to be right there attending closely to the voice on the phone. And yet — and this was the retrospectively marvelous part — even as you were dividing your attention between the phone call and all sorts of other idle little fuguelike activities, you were somehow never haunted by the suspicion that the person on the other end’s attention might be similarly divided.
[…] Video telephony rendered the fantasy insupportable. Callers now found they had to compose the same sort of earnest, slightly overintense listener’s expression they had to compose for in-person exchanges. Those caller who out of unconscious habit succumbed to fuguelike doodling or pants-crease-adjustment now came off looking extra rude, absentminded, or childishly self-absorbed. Callers who even more unconsciously blemish-scanned or nostril explored looked up to find horrified expressions on the video-faces at the other end. All of which resulted in videophonic stress.
And then there’s the brutal, desperate vanity of it all:
And the videophonic stress was even worse if you were at all vain. I.e. if you worried at all about how you looked. As in to other people. Which all kidding aside who doesn’t. Good old aural telephone calls could be fielded without makeup, toupee, surgical prostheses, etc. Even without clothes, if that sort of thing rattled your saber. But for the image-conscious, there was of course no answer-as-you-are informality about visual-video telephone calls, which consumers began to see were less like having the good old phone ring than having the doorbell ring and having to throw on clothes and attach prostheses and do hair-checks in the foyer mirror before answering the door.
And please: if you use Skype to connect with loved ones across the country or world, this is not the type of video calling I am talking about. I’m talking about the kind where your weird neighbor calls up while you are making Coco Wheats for your son and you have brown sugar spilled all over the place and the cats are lapping it up manically and your friend is staring at you through your iPhone and getting annoyed because (1) you are managing domestic chaos when you’re supposed to be talking to him about Inane Life Factors, and (2) your hair looks like you have a nest of cerulean warblers knitted into it.
So that’s why I hate video calling, and you should too. THE END. Thank you, tip your bartenders, and hey, the salmon was great.
Link time:
The dance of the 3-way street. A great video showing the dangerous and insane dance between cars, bicyclists and pedestrians in a busy NYC intersection. There are many ways to show these sort of interactions, and this one is so well done.
No more fish in the sea: David McCandless created a data visualization showing fish stocks in 1900 and 2000. The result isn’t stark, it’s shocking: in many previously-rich areas, the fish are just gone.
Neverending shampoo: the sophomoric jerk inside me appreciates this sort of practical joke. The other 1% finds it over the top.
Have a good weekend, everyone.
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More links:
MIPRO Consulting main website.
