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[…] The same fiber-digital grid as the phone companies, the
advent of video-telephoning (a.k.a. 'videophony') enjoyed an interval of huge
consumer popularity -- callers thrilled at the idea of phone-interfacing both
aurally and facially (the little first-generation phone-video cameras being too
crude and narrow-apertured for anything much more than facial close-ups) on
first-generation teleputers that at that time were little more than high-tech tv
sets, though of course they had that little 'intelligent-agent' homuncular icon
that would appear at the lower-right of a broadcast/cable program and tell you
the time and temperature outside or remind you to take your blood-pressure medication
or alert you to a particularly compelling entertainment-option now coming up on
channel like 491 or something, or of course now alerting you to an incoming
video-phone call and then tap-dancing with a little iconic straw boater and
cane just under a menu of possible options for response, and callers did love
their little homuncular icons -- but why, within like 16 months or 5 sales
quarters, the tumescent demand curve for 'Videophony' suddenly collapsed like a
kicked tent, so that, by the year of the depend adult undergarment, fewer than
10% of all private telephone communications utilized any video-image-fiber
data-transfers or coincident products and services, the average u.s. phone-user
deciding that s/he actually preferred the retrograde old low-tech bell-era
voice-only telephonic interface after all, a preferential about-face that cost a
good many precipitant video-telephony-related entrepreneurs their shirts, plus
destabilizing two highly respected mutual funds that had ground-floored heavily
in video-phone technology, and very nearly wiping out the maryland state
employees' retirement system's freddie-mac fund, a fund whose administrator's
mistress's brother had been an almost manically precipitant
video-phone-technology entrepreneur . . . And but so why the abrupt consumer
retreat back to good old voice-only telephoning?
The answer, in a kind of trivalent nutshell, is: (1)
emotional stress, (2) physical vanity, (3) a certain queer kind of
self-obliterating logic in the microeconomics of consumer high-tech.
(1) 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. A traditional aural-only conversation --
utilizing a hand-held phone whose earpiece contained only 6 little pinholes but
whose mouthpiece (rather significantly, it later seemed) contained (62) or 36
little pinholes -- 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. During a traditional call, e.g., as you let's say
performed a close tactile blemish-scan of your chin, you were in no way
oppressed by the thought that your phonemate was perhaps also devoting a good
percentage of her attention to a close tactile blemish-scan. It was an illusion
and the illusion was aural and aurally supported: the phone-line's other end's
voice was dense, tightly compressed, and vectored right into your ear, enabling
you to imagine that the voice's owner's attention was similarly compressed and
focused . . . Even though your own attention was not, was the thing. This
bilateral illusion of unilateral attention was almost infantilely gratifying
from an emotional standpoint: you got to believe you were receiving somebody's
complete attention without having to return it. Regarded with the objectivity
of hindsight, the illusion appears arational, almost literally fantastic: it
would be like being able both to lie and to trust other people at the same
time.
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
callers who out of unconscious habit succumbed to fuguelike doodling or
pants-crease-adjustment now came off looking 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.
Even worse, of course, was the traumatic expulsion-from-eden
feeling of looking up from tracing your thumb's outline on the reminder pad or
adjusting the old unit's angle of repose in your shorts and actually seeing
your videophonic interfacee idly strip a shoelace of its gumlet as she talked
to you, and suddenly realizing your whole infantile fantasy of commanding your
partner's attention while you yourself got to fugue-doodle and make little
genital-adjustments was deluded and insupportable and that you were actually
commanding not one bit more attention than you were paying, here. The whole
attention business was monstrously stressful, video callers found.
(2) and the videophonic stress was even worse if you were at
all vain. I.e. If you worried at all about how you looked. As in to other
people. Which all kidding aside who doesn't. Good old aural telephone calls
could be fielded without makeup, toupee, surgical prostheses, etc. Even without
clothes, if that sort of thing rattled your saber. But for the image-conscious,
there was of course no such answer-as-you-are informality about visual-video
telephone calls, which consumers began to see were less like having the good
old phone ring than having the doorbell ring and having to throw on clothes and
attach prostheses and do hair-checks in the foyer mirror before answering the
door.
But the real coffin-nail for videophony involved the way
callers' faces looked on their tp screen, during calls. Not their callers'
faces, but their own, when they saw them on video. It was a three-button
affair:, after all, to use the tp's cartridge-card's video-record option to
record both pulses in a two-way visual call and play the call back and see how
your face had actually looked to the other person during the call. 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.
The proposed solution to what the telecommunications
industry's psychological consultants termed video-physiognomic dysphoria (or
vpd) was, of course, the advent of high-definition masking; and in fact it was
those entrepreneurs who gravitated toward the production of high-definition
videophonic imaging and then outright masks who got in and out of the
short-lived videophonic era with their shirts plus solid additional nets.
Mask-wise, the initial option of high-definition
photographic imaging -- i.e. Taking the most flattering elements of a variety
of flattering multi-angle photos of a given phone-consumer and -- thanks to
existing image-configuration equipment already pioneered by the cosmetics and
law-enforcement industries -- combining them into a wildly attractive high-def
broadcastable composite of a face wearing an earnest, slightly overintense
expression of complete attention -- was quickly supplanted by the more
inexpensive and byte-economical option of (using the exact same cosmetic-and-fbi
software) actually casting the enhanced facial image in a form-fitting
polybutylene-resin mask, and consumers soon found that the high up-front cost
of a permanent wearable mask was more than worth it, considering the stress-
and vfd-reduction benefits, and the convenient velcro straps for the back of
the mask and caller's head cost peanuts; and for a couple fiscal quarters
phone/cable companies were able to rally vpd-afflicted consumers' confidence by
working out a horizontally integrated deal where free composite-and-masking
services came with a videophone hookup. The high-def masks, when not in use,
simply hung on a small hook on the side of a tp's phone-console, admittedly
looking maybe a bit surreal and discomfiting when detached and hanging there
empty and wrinkled, and sometimes there were potentially awkward
mistaken-identity snafus involving multi-user family or company phones and the
hurried selection and attachment of the wrong mask taken from some long row of
empty hanging masks -- but all in all the masks seemed initially like a viable
industry response to the vanity,-stress,-and-nixonian-facial-image problem.
(2 and maybe also 3) but combine the natural entrepreneurial
instinct to satisfy all sufficiently high consumer demand, on the one hand,
with what appears to be an almost equally natural distortion in the way persons
tend to see themselves, and it becomes possible to account historically for the
speed with which the whole high-def-videophonic-mask thing spiralled totally
out of control. Not only is it weirdly hard to evaluate what you yourself look
like, like whether you're good-looking or not -- e.g. Try looking in the mirror
and determining where you stand in the attractiveness-hierarchy with anything
like the objective ease you can determine whether just about anyone else you
know is good-looking or not -- but it turned out that 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. High-def
mask-entrepreneurs ready and willing to supply not just verisimilitude but
aesthetic enhancement -- stronger chins, smaller eye-bags, air-brushed scars
and wrinkles -- soon pushed the original mimetic-mask-entrepreneurs right out
of the market. In a gradually unsubtlizing progression, within a couple more
sales-quarters most consumers were now using masks so undeniably better-looking
on videophones than their real faces were in person, transmitting to one
another such horrendously skewed and enhanced masked images of themselves, 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.
The social anxieties surrounding the phenomenon
psych-consultants termed optimistically misrepresentational masking (or omm)
intensified steadily as the tiny crude first-generation videophone cameras'
technology improved to where the aperture wasn't as narrow, and now the
higher-end tiny cameras could countenance and transmit more or less full-body
images. Certain psychologically unscrupulous entrepreneurs began marketing
full-body polybutylene and -urethane 2-d cutouts -- sort of like the headless
muscleman and bathing-beauty cutouts you could stand behind and position your
chin on the cardboard neck-stump of for cheap photos at the beach, only these
full-body videophone-masks were vastly more high-tech and convincing-looking. Once
you added variable 2-d wardrobe, hair- and eye-color options, various aesthetic
enlargements and reductions, etc., costs started to press the envelope of
mass-market affordability, even though there was at the same time horrific
social pressure to be able to afford the very best possible masked 2-d
body-image, to keep from feeling comparatively hideous-looking on the phone.
How long, then, could one expect it to have been before the relentless
entrepreneurial drive toward an ever-better mousetrap conceived of the
transmittable tableau (a.k.a. Tt), which in retrospect was probably the really
sharp business-end of the videophonic coffin-nail. With tts, facial and bodily
masking could now be dispensed with altogether and replaced with the
video-transmitted image of what was essentially 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, etc.
The tableaux were simply high-quality transmission-ready
photographs, scaled down to diorama-like proportions and fitted with a plastic
holder over the videophone camera, not unlike a lens-cap. Extremely
good-looking but not terrifically successful entertainment-celebrities -- the
same sort who in decades past would have swelled the cast-lists of infomercials
-- found themselves in demand as models for various high-end videophone
tableaux.
Because they involved simple transmission-ready photography
instead of computer imaging and enhancement, the tableaux could be
mass-produced and commensurately priced, and for a brief time they helped ease
the tension between the high cost of enhanced body-masking and the monstrous
aesthetic pressures videophony exerted on callers, not to mention also
providing employment for set-designers, photographers, airbrushers, and
infomercial-level celebrities hard-pressed by the declining fortunes of
broadcast television advertising.
(3) but there's some sort of revealing lesson here in the
beyond-short-term viability-curve of advances in consumer technology. The
career of videophony conforms neatly to this curve's classically annular shape:
first there's some sort of terrific, sci-fi-like advance in consumer tech --
like from aural to video phoning -- which advance always, however, has certain
unforeseen disadvantages for the consumer; and then but the market-niches
created by those disadvantages -- like people's stressfully vain repulsion at
their own videophonic appearance -- are ingeniously filled via sheer
entrepreneurial verve; and yet the very advantages of these ingenious
disadvantage-compensations seem all too often to undercut the original
high-tech advance, resulting in consumer-recidivism and curve-closure and
massive shirt-loss for precipitant investors. In the present case, the
stress-and-vanity-compensations' own evolution saw video-callers rejecting
first their own faces and then even their own heavily masked and enhanced
physical likenesses and finally covering the video-cameras altogether and
transmitting attractively stylized static tableaux to one another's tps. And,
behind these lens-cap dioramas and transmitted tableaux, callers of course
found that they were once again stresslessly invisible, unvainly makeup- and
toupeeless and baggy-eyed behind their celebrity-dioramas, once again free --
since once again unseen -- to doodle, blemish-scan, manicure, crease-check --
while on their screen, the attractive, intensely attentive face of the well-appointed
celebrity on the other end's tableau reassured them that they were the objects
of a concentrated attention they themselves didn't have to exert.
And of course but these advantages were nothing other than
the once-lost and now-appreciated advantages of good old bell-era blind
aural-only telephoning, with its 6 and (62) pinholes. The only difference was
that now these expensive silly unreal stylized tableaux were being transmitted
between tps on high-priced video-fiber lines. How much time, after this
realization sank in and spread among consumers (mostly via phone,
interestingly), would any micro-econometrist expect to need to pass before
high-tech visual videophony was mostly abandoned, then, a return to good old
telephoning not only dictated by common consumer sense but actually after a
while culturally approved as a kind of chic integrity, not ludditism but a kind
of retrograde transcendence of sci-fi-ish high-tech for its own sake, a
transcendence of the vanity and the slavery to high-tech fashion that people
view as so unattractive in one another. In other words a return to aural-only
telephony became, at the closed curve's end, a kind of status-symbol of
anti-vanity, such that only callers utterly lacking in self-awareness continued
to use videophony and tableaux, to say nothing of masks, and these tacky
facsimile-using people became ironic cultural symbols of tacky vain slavery to
corporate pr and high-tech novelty, became the subsidized era's tacky
equivalents of people with leisure suits, black velvet paintings, sweater-vests
for their poodles, electric zirconium jewelry, nocoat lin-guascrapers, and c.
Most communications consumers put their tableaux-dioramas at the back of a
knick-knack shelf and covered their cameras with standard black lens-caps and
now used their phone consoles' little mask-hooks to hang these new little
plasticene address-and-phone diaries specially made with a little receptacle at
the top of the binding for convenient hanging from former mask-hooks. Even
then, of course, the bulk of u.s. consumers remained verifiably reluctant to
leave home and teleputer and to interface personally, though this phenomenon's
endurance can't be attributed to the videophony-fad per se, and anyway the new
panagoraphobia served to open huge new entrepreneurial teleputerized markets
for home-shopping and -delivery, and didn't cause much industry concern. […]
Uit: Infinite Jest van David Foster Wallace (1996).
