One really weird thing about video conferencing is that you're constantly exposed to a slightly delayed, pixelated, and poorly lit picture of your own face. Th

One really weird thing about video conferencing is that you're constantly exposed to a slightly delayed, pixelated, and poorly lit picture of your own face. That's a deeply abnormal situation. It's like talking to someone while sitting in front of a fun house mirror. Who would subject themselves to such a metaphysical nightmare? And that's just one of the little uncanny distortions that video conferencing brings. You might enjoy this excerpt from a novel, which predicts a bad future for video chat: http://declineofscarcity.com/?page_id=2527 http://declineofscarcity.com/?page_id=2527 Sample: > It turned out that there was something terribly stressful about visual telephone interfaces that hadn’t been stressful at all about voice-only interfaces. Videophone consumers seemed suddenly to realize that they’d been subject to an insidious but wholly marvelous delusion about conventional voice-only telephony. They’d never noticed it before, the delusion — it’s like it was so emotionally complex that it could be countenanced only in the context of its loss. 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. And: > This sort of appearance-check was no more resistible than a mirror. But the experience proved almost universally horrifying. People were horrified at how their own faces appeared on a TP screen. It wasn’t just ‘Anchorman’s Bloat,’ that well-known impression of extra weight that video inflicts on the face. It was worse. Even with high-end TPs’ high-def viewer-screens, consumers perceived something essentially blurred and moist-looking about their phone-faces, a shiny pallid indefiniteness that struck them as not just unflattering but somehow evasive, furtive, untrustworthy, unlikable. In an early and ominous InterLace/G.T.E. focus-group survey that was all but ignored in a storm of entrepreneurial sci-fi-tech enthusiasm, almost 60% of respondents who received visual access to their own faces during videophonic calls specifically used the terms untrustworthy, unlikable, or hard to like in describing their own visage’s appearance, with a phenomenally ominous 71 % of senior-citizen respondents specifically comparing their video-faces to that of Richard Nixon during the Nixon-Kennedy debates of B.S. 1960.