When I was a kid in the 1970s, video chat was mostly science fiction. Some high end companies were starting to play with the idea of video conferencing, but it was expensive to set up, and not too reliable. There were some exhibits using it in Futureworld in Disneyworld, then later in EPCOT center. But it was still this really advanced thing.
Flash forward to today. Now, I’ve had video chat capability for about a decade, but I don’t use it much. Goodness knows why, but I don’t. Mostly, I use it to talk to my son as the cheap version of chatting, because videochat over Skype doesn’t use phone minutes, and we both have devices that do it.
I think it’s kind of weird as all get out that we have this total science fiction technology that all the science fiction books and movies said we’d be using on a regular basis. And yet, for the most part, I kinda don’t.
Do you use it? And if so, and you’re an Asimov fan, do you ever get kind of a Naked Sun vibe from doing so?
I work with a lot of clients that are long past retirement and wanting to use their computers to connect to grandchildren. I tell them about Skype (describing it like the old Dick Tracy Wrist TV), but very few are interested. The only person I ever Skype is a lady in a city 150 miles away that I have a long distance relationship with. It does seem odd that we haven’t ‘taken’ to it as much as we thought we would, but it is rarely actually convenient.