It’s here. The whiz-bang technology we have all been waiting for: the videophone. The iPhone’s revolutionary new FaceTime feature brings us face to face with the person we are phoning up (that is, assuming they also have a new iPhone). And as much as we have been anticipating the videophone’s neato cool advent, there is a question to how much we are really going to like using this new little gizmo.
Besides the necessity of two iPhone 4s to make the video chat possible, both parties will have to have access to Wi-Fi for these in-your-face calls to work. But you can always use your iPhone 4 to ring up a friend computer’s iChat, right? Not really. FaceTime and iChat don’t exactly talk to each other. Of course, most of these obstacles are easily surmountable.
The big hurdle, it turns out, will be our vanity. Do we really want people to see us at any hour of the day in our skivvies or without our makeup? Worse, do we want our friends and associates catching us in mid eye roll, or worse yet, having that semi-comatose look of complete disinterest? In David Foster Wallace’s 1996 novel, Infinite Jest, he predicted not only the coming of the videophone, but its rapid demise. Face-to-face phone calls are, Wallace argues, maybe just a little too much information.
