party shout

face plam hd

ichatAVhandpiece

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.

http://kottke.org/10/06/david-foster-wallace-on-iphone-4s-facetime

I think video chat has gotten around this by always sticking the mirror in the corner. do you leave that on while you are chatting? I did until I noticed that I just looked at myself the whole time.

Yeah I find a strange pull to look at myself if I leave the mirror up on my screen.

also, damn onny you ain't kidding about that ad.

I think the fact that you have to hold the phone away from your face (which will be tiring) will severely limit the number of facetime calls to only those with whom you really care. There will probably be an awkward transition period, though, as we develop social mores for this new interaction.

I've used Google video chat with Elin before, when she was living in NYC for a month. By far, the most comfortable way of using it was as a passive telepresence device. We'd leave it on and then just go about doing what we'd normally do alone--read a book or whatever. When we had something to say, we'd say it, have a short conversation and then return to our reading. Since there was no per-minute cost or device to hold up, there was no outside pressure to have a densely-packed interaction. Facetime for the iPhone may not really afford this, but facetime for iPad might.

re: the ad
it's not sam mendes' ad
I watched the keynote, which entailed watching the ad again. I think there may be some weird thing going on. At first, there is the mom and baby talking to the dad. Then, it's the same mom and dad, but this time with an older child. Is this a different child or the same child, older? Has dad not come home in 4 years? Also, is the asian woman talking to the soldier the same as the deaf couple? Did the soldier lose his hearing at war? What happened to the child she was about to have? Also, is that Matt Damon's little brother? Perhaps I'm going crazy.

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