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This is not so with voice or text mediums.
With my girlfriend, parents and siblings I'm at ease and comfortable. In fact, I really enjoy it. With everybody else, though, I feel somewhere between indifferent, annoyed, and dreadful.
I wonder how much of this is generational-- my teenage daughter probably videochats more in a week than I have in my life. I think that over the longue duree , a lot of technology shifts occur not because individuals gradually get convinced to move to the new technology, but because the folks clinging to the old ways eventually die out. (I'm paraphrasing Kuhn on paradigm change in science, of course.)
More seriously tho', I don't think it's wise to extrapolate from teenagers, because socially, they're not very sophisticated and don't have very long attention spans anyway. Grownups prefer much richer interactions that you need the whole spectrum of body language for (dropped frames in video calls misses this), intonation (poor audio in video calls misses this), ambience, the place you meet matters, and so on. That's why video calling is a solution looking for a problem.
As they say in TV, video chatting with your clothes on is a bit pointless.
'nuff said.
because it's very awkward that the camera is not in the same place you are looking. You're looking at the monitor, when the webcam is most often above the monitor. So all the viewer (and vice versa) sees is you looking down. It's not "eye-to-eye" conversation. If you want the other person to feel like they are looking at you, you have to look dead into the camera. But then you miss out on seeing the other person.
This. Video chat fails at providing an emotional connection because of this. It leaves you feeling like you are talking past someone. It's a fundamental problem with the technology that can't really be solved unless we literally put a camera in the middle of the screen.
[1] http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=6726...
So, no, I don't want to video chat unless we have a really good reason to. Something that involves showing me a video feed of X, where X can't be copy-pasted.
I'd definitely use it more if my immediate family had another computer with a webcam. That would be great for times when one of us is away for a few days. I expect we will acquire a second device with a webcam later this year, and then we'll see how it works out. :)
Thinking about it now, it seems like it would also be nice for the occasional call with old friends who live too far away to see very often. (We do use it that way occasionally with one of my wife's former roommates.) I'll have to keep that in mind.
On the other hand, there are definitely lots of phone calls I'd rather not have video on -- almost anything business-related, for instance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This. Video chat fails at providing an emotional connection because of this. It leaves you feeling like you are talking past someone. It's a fundamental problem with the technology that can't really be solved unless we literally put a camera in the middle of the screen.
Is this possible?
because it's very awkward that the camera is not in the same place you are looking. You're looking at the monitor, when the webcam is most often above the monitor. So all the viewer (and vice versa) sees is you looking down. It's not "eye-to-eye" conversation. If you want the other person to feel like they are looking at you, you have to look dead into the camera. But then you miss out on seeing the other person.
This. Video chat fails at providing an emotional connection because of this. It leaves you feeling like you are talking past someone. It's a fundamental problem with the technology that can't really be solved unless we literally put a camera in the middle of the screen.