I'm staring, endlessly, at a screen.
My sister, or a pixelated version of the top half of her face, is telling me about a book she thinks I absolutely must read. The connection is good, but not great. A green blob slithers from the upper-left corner of the screen toward her head. It reaches the poster on the wall behind her and pauses, like a living thing scoping out some new territory. A moment later it presses onward toward the edge of her hair.
The green blob is a familiar ghost in the Skype wires — one of a dozen or so digital distractions that compete for attention with the glitchy video feed. It shares screen space with garish branding, pinging spam-bots, and of course the little mirror-image of my own tired face.
And yet that's only a small part of why I've decided to cut Skype — and its better-designed competitors FaceTime and Facebook Messenger video — out of my life.
In a lot of ways I'm the target consumer for these video-chat products. I'm "millennial," tech savvy, and have a number of friends and family members living in different states that I love to talk to on a regular basis.
Up until a couple weeks ago, I made it a point to video-call each of these people regularly. I was sure that face-to-digital-face conversations would be more meaningful than the endless text threads that form most of the tenuous substance of the modern long-distance friendship.
Video chat is, on its face, an astonishing technology, the stuff of "Star Trek." When I was a teenager back in the misty aughts I read an article promising that "video phones" would arrive by 2025 and thought that seemed unlikely.
Now, thanks to Skype and its ilk, you can reach out across barriers of time and space to watch subtleties of emotion flash across your loved ones' faces as you chat in real time. When I proposed this article, my colleague Antonio Villas-Boas objected strongly; Skype offers his only opportunity to regularly see his dad, who lives in Portugal.
But the lived experience of video-chatting with loved ones is grating. Even Antonio acknowledges that due to Skype's seemingly endless glitches, video calls end up consumed by conversations about the calls themselves and their sketchy quality more than anything else.
I think the problem goes deeper though. A video call is just fundamentally unlike talking with someone in real life or even on the old-fashioned phone.
This is true in ways that go beyond the errors and distractions of Skype's user interface; even the highest-quality FaceTime is just a live-stream of your loved one sitting in front of a laptop, represented flatly on the same screen you use to watch "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt" and read bad tweets.
At best, you'll have the illusion of looking one another in the hairline, depicted from an odd, neck-level perspective. If you're using a smartphone or iPad, your partner will find you looking off awkwardly to their side. And of course, there's the unconquerable temptation to tap, click, or swipe.
These are individually minor complaints with an undeniably world-changing technology, but they add up to an experience that's less human than the audio phone call.
A phone call, unlike a video call, is fundamentally similar to the experience it technologically replaces. Assuming you achieve reasonably good quality (Skype's audio function is, in fact, great for this purpose over international borders) there's little difference between hearing a person in the same room and through a speaker.
Recently, I've made a point of talking to the people I care about on the phone. Absent the little square pictures of them squinting into a computer, I feel closer to them, more aware of the nuances and emotional overtones of their voices in my ear.
The result is a deeper level of connection with the person I'm talking to. Where a video call is cold and removed, a phone call is textured and layered.
Of course, no rule is absolute. There are moments when I want to see someone's face as we speak — like when a friend recently contacted me to report his engagement. But those happy-occasion video chats work better as rare exceptions than as the norm.
Look at someone's flat, digital image too often and your relationship becomes just that: pixelated and uninspiring.
