Many people that I asked recently pointed to convenience as the culprit. It is too hard to coordinate a video call, they would say, too much of a pain to setup

Many people that I asked recently pointed to convenience as the culprit. It is too hard to coordinate a video call, they would say, too much of a pain to setup and initiate. But is that really true? In my gmail chat window right now I can see video icons next to the names of roughly a dozen of my friends that are at their computers right now, logged into gmail at the same time as me, and literally one click away from joining me in a video chat. But guess what? We never click that button. It's a factor. For people who don't have a one-click flawless iphone experience, clicking on the gchat icon when you don't know exactly what's going to happen is a sufficient barrier that it's not worth worrying about when you know exactly how regular chat will work and will do exactly what you want. Once people figure out how to make it work for them, or the technology gets more simple and reliable, it'll be used a lot though it will never fully replace voice chat or texting. There's already plenty of stories of people using video chat. My roommate uses his iPhone to cook dinner with his mother, who lives 6000 miles away. Even on Star Trek, video chat wasn't ubiquitous. Communicators did not display video, as quite clearly there are times when it's convenient to hear someone's voice and have eyes free to focus elsewhere.