Video Calling: Did the Sci-fi Concept Keep Its Appeal?
Like 3D printing and tablets, video calling emerged from science fiction into reality. It took its time. The first use of videotelephony in movies can be traced back to 1927’s Metropolis, a German silent film that melds the world of robots and elevated highways with human superstition. In Metropolis’ case, the video phone required a Bakelite-style handset for speech.
Zoom
The concept of dialing a video feed through the internet exploded in popularity in 2020, when Zoom had its time in the sun. The conferencing platform now has a market share of around 50% in the UK and US. Live video entertainment already had an earlier foothold in entertainment, helping gamers play online roulette at Paddy Power for example. This type of experience places the dealer back at the center of the game. Via a sound stage, croupiers are filmed dealing cards or spinning a roulette wheel. It’s designed to be more authentic to the brick-and-mortar casino, allowing players to communicate with the dealer and see their bets placed in real time.
A 2021 study from Jupiter Research revealed that video calling usage increased by 50% in 2020. It also predicted that half of all mobile subscribers would use the technology by the mid-point of this decade. Interestingly, this data seems to allay fears about a sudden slump in Zoom’s popularity, after the Vox website worried that it could come “back down to Earth”.
Immediate Responses
What’s slightly unusual is that voice calling is in rapid decline. As the saying goes, millennials don’t answer the phone. Psychologist Dr. McGeehan claims that the generation doesn’t appreciate being forced into scenarios that require immediate responses, preferring written communication.
A study conducted by the British tabloid Metro confirmed the association between phone calls and pressure, noting that more than half the people polled expected unpleasant news from a “cold” call from family and friends.
Ofcom found that minutes spent on both fixed and mobile voice calls dropped from 225bn minutes to 202bn minutes in the decade to 2022.
So, it’s only the combined world of video and audio calling that’s popular today. The sole reason the telephone existed – talking – has been superseded by other ways of communicating. This brings us to another contradiction. Text messaging is also in decline but, ironically, the millennial way of talking via text is very much in vogue.
Of course, WhatsApp, not text messaging, keeps the written word alive in telephony. One of the few available studies about the decline in text messaging comes from the Pew Research Center, which found that the number of SMSs sent in the US fell by 10% between 2011 and 2017. The fact that text messages cost money, while WhatsApp is free, is bound to be a factor.
Communication won’t stop evolving, although, it’s not always easy to see where we go next. The next Big Thing, the metaverse, a seemingly inevitable combination of every type of modern technology, seems to have already failed. Mark Zuckerberg’s pet project cost Facebook $46.5 billion. The loss is so great it “would be a Fortune 100 company”, Fortune wrote.
Maybe telepathy comes next.