The recent mass adoption of video-calling has reminded people of David Foster Wallace’s otherworldly tale of “videophony” in the then-near-future in the book Infinite Jest. This is from Jason Kottke’s blog post referencing the book when FaceTime was announced:
… 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.
My favourite part is in the continuation of this, when people moved to wearing “form-fitting polybutylene-resin masks” in order to improve how they found themselves looking on video phone calls, but which then had unintended consequences:
“consumers’ instinctively skewed self-perception, plus vanity-related stress, meant that they began preferring and then outright demanding videophone masks that were really quite a lot better-looking than they themselves were in person”
so much so that
“enormous psychosocial stress began to result, large numbers of phone-users suddenly reluctant to leave home and interface personally with people who, they feared, were now habituated to seeing their far-better-looking masked selves on the phone and would on seeing them in person suffer (so went the callers’ phobia) the same illusion-shattering aesthetic disappointment that, e.g., certain women who always wear makeup give people the first time they ever see them without makeup.”
which led to the abandonment of masks altogether in favour of
“”…a heavily doctored still-photograph, one of an incredibly fit and attractive and well-turned-out human being, someone who actually resembled you the caller only in such limited respects as like race and limb-number, the photo’s face focused attentively in the direction of the video-phonic camera from amid the sumptuous but not ostentatious appointments of the sort of room that best reflected the image of yourself you wanted to transmit”
which eventually led to some people returning back to audio-only telephony, only now as a “status-symbol of anti-vanity“, a form of virtue-signalling.
DFW may have been an oddball, but he understood human nature better than most, and was able to describe it as no one else could.