Videos Calls, Screen Time and One Star Reviews
How do you connect your laptop to the screen? What time are we killing?
This is what it’s like trying to make a video call in 2024. First, you negotiate the maze of proprietary services with the person you want to call, backwards and forwards until you settle on one you can both use. FaceTime? No, you don’t use Apple products. WhatsApp video? No, you don’t have headphones that fit into your phone. Zoom? No, you don’t have that installed. And so on until, like one of those deductive reasoning puzzles, you find one that works for everyone. We call this dance the “coordination tax”.
Once you have picked, and made the call, and listened to the weird music that plays instead of a dialling tone, the first thing we say is: “Can you hear me?” Alexander Graham Bell’s preferred way to answer the telephone was “Ahoy hoy”. How we have fallen. From that to: “I can see you, but I can’t hear you. Can you hear me?”
1876. That’s when the first telephone call was made (“Mr Watson, come here, I want to speak to you”). No hesitant checking to make sure Mr Watson could hear him. No working out how to get the audio working. No asking if the speaker was connected properly. It, in the words of Apple, just worked. 1876. A century and a half ago.
When I go into an office, I find a rat’s tail of cables to plug my laptop into the screen. Do I need to change the television input? Will it auto-detect my laptop but take a few seconds? Do I need to press “source”? Would it be easier to plug straight into HDMI2 with my own cable? What about presenter mode? Do I need to press FN and something?
We didn’t have these problems with overhead projectors and acetate. You put the picture on the projector, and it appeared on the wall.
As I see someone fiddling with the audio settings on their laptop to get the audio to come out of their headphones rather than the speaker, or as I chat to someone whose video is a little grey Cluedo token because “my webcam never works with Teams,” I wonder whether we have improved things. Of course, there are more features. And the quality is better. We can have calls with clear pseudo-HD video and clear audio. But as I watch someone pixelate and slow to a jerky crawl, their voice going squelchy and then silent, their face frozen in a grimace of digital despair, I wonder whether we improved things.
For all the advancements we have made, if you want to reliably get hold of someone, the best way is to phone them. It’s not just that making an unannounced video call feels intrusive. I have zero confidence video calling anyone will even work. If they don’t have the app open or if they have notifications turned off, the call will ring and ring, but they’ll never hear it. Or their Watch will ring but their phone and computer won’t. Or they’ll try to answer, and the beach ball will spin and spin.
Perhaps we can blame ourselves for silencing notifications or force quitting apps. But it is only because of our industry’s behaviour that we need to take these steps. As a child, the only devices in the house that spontaneously made a noise were the phone and the doorbell. And both were triggered only at appropriate times in appropriate ways. We didn’t have to worry about muting them. The doorbell company wouldn’t play the doorbell to tell us about a sale they were running on door knockers. The phone wouldn’t ring with impersonal adverts supposedly targeted at us.
We might say this is Jevon’s Paradox: if you make something more efficient, people do it more, making it work less well. Only it’s not demand this increases. It is irritation. We have made things so easy that companies annoy us too much.
And so we turn off our notifications and mute our phones and uninstall our apps. There is a sort of backward Yogi Berra logic to all of this - no one leaves notifications on because they get too many notifications. And still, I find myself thinking: all this effort and money and technology and power, and we still begin calls with “can you hear me?” We are standing on the shoulders of giants, stubbing our toes on our own feet.
Elsewhere
Scroll through Yelp and you’ll find Mikey, who left Florida for California only to be underwhelmed by the Pacific Ocean. “I’ll stick with pools that can be heated thank you very much,” he explains. And Emily, who couldn’t believe that people were so impressed with the “national disappointment” that is the Liberty Bell. “Not in a tower. Cannot be rung,” she writes, “AND it’s broken.” And Nicholas, whose summary of a trip to the Happiest Place on Earth is surprisingly masochistic. “Spent thousands just to have all the cast hit on my girlfriend. I hate this place,” he says in his one-star review of Disney World. “I will probably come back though.”
This isn’t an article about substandard products or experiences that deserve one-star reviews, as much as the psychology of writing a one-star review. Perhaps this is another aspect of lack of control we feel with our technology. The only way we can have our say is by writing a disgruntled review, and sending it out like a message in a digital bottle onto the surfacing waves of the net, hoping it will be heard by someone, anyone.
Heat Death of the Internet by Gregory Bennett in Takahē:
You want to order from a local restaurant, but you need to download a third-party delivery app, even though you plan to pick it up yourself. The prices and menu on the app are different to what you saw in the window. When you download a second app the prices are different again. You ring the restaurant directly and it says the number is no longer in service. You go to the restaurant and order in person. You mention that their website has the wrong number and the woman behind the counter says they have to contact the company who designed the site for changes, which will cost them, but most people just order through an app anyway.
I’ve become almost bored with myself complaining about what we’ve done to the modern web. But seeing it all laid out like this, in comedy form, it’s hard not to recognise my own daily experience. Every new service I use begins with a period of trepidation: is this website going to be broken? Is it going to be annoying in some way.
Two quotes from this article that struck me (albeit one is quoting something else):
As everyone who’s had pain in their thumb from scrolling knows, the actual point of “screen time” is the time part—the hours it allows you to numbly burn up. There’s no “more efficient” version of social media because you can’t pass time any more quickly.
I was thinking the other day, how I never get bored any more. That time when I used to be left alone with my thoughts is now filled with emails and podcasts and social media feeds. And in many ways that is wonderful. But also, that time just disappears and I don’t even notice it passing.
Granting the premise that the phone is an antidote to living, though, I was wondering: what is it I personally don't want to live through? If I paid attention, at precisely the moments my attention tried to veer away, what would I find I was doing and feeling and thinking? What about existence makes me reach for my pocket?
That’s all for today, take care,
Simon