I can imagine a world without Skype, but I try not to dwell on the negative.
For better or worse, I am highly available. I maintain your average number of gadgets and accounts for those gadgets, far from limited to my smartphone, my email and Facebook accounts, my two laptops and my two Twitter accounts. There are many, many ways for a person to contact me, or for a pigeon of above average intelligence. Or for a rock, if the pigeon throwing the rock had decent enough aim.
Hello, rock. You have my full attention. I am listening.
The worst of these, obviously, is Facebook, destroyer of time, decorum and worlds. Snapchat and Instagram are less bad but, given time, not much less.
You could argue Skype’s on the other end of the spectrum. It’s a mild offender, since it doesn’t prompt users for silly overshares of exhausted memes or political rants. There’s a cleanliness to Skype that’s otherwise lacking in my communication forums. On Skype, a vertical column of green and yellow dots represents my contacts, most of whom haven’t bothered with so much as a picture. That’s fine. I remember what nearly all of them look like.
It’s as though everyone grew so exhausted by the useless posing and fake smiles on rhymes-with-Schmacebook that, when they went to make their Skype accounts, the dots simply sufficed. No one poses on Skype because no one else wants them to. Even the face of the female Asian model that used to crop up when you opened the application grew to be so disliked that entire Reddit threads devoted themselves to scrubbing her image from your computer screen. (Unlike her, I regularly Skype unshowered and in my pajamas. I’m your archetypal—you could say model—Skype user, and I would happily, selflessly don pajamas as the next face of Skype.)
Unlike my social media accounts, I don’t waste time on Skype, though I spend my share of time there. My parents love Skype. They love it! We Skype their house in Manassas every weekend like it’s a religious occasion (and in fairness, that’s as close as I get to most religious occasions).
And I do appreciate Skype. That is, I appreciate talking with my parents on Skype. Skype as a medium is difficult to appreciate because I’m usually too busy on it, fixing my hair. The state of the hair? Wholly irrelevant. It could be slicked back for prom night or slicked back with baby cereal. Either way, I’m messing with it on Skype. There’s no way to be on it and not be finger-combing at the same time. I know I’m not alone in this. The first thing my sister-in-law says when we Skype her is never an address to us, but to her bangs.
My family’s been Skyping for a long time now, but getting a Skype call is still an occasion for us, like I would imagine the receipt of a telegram used to be. The Skype ringtone is the only thing that can make my son, husband and I literally run to the study desk. The times we call them seem equally miraculous. How is it possible they were sitting at their computers at the exact time we clicked the video call icon? The mind’s swift to gloss over iPhones in the face of a miracle.
Actually, it’s not nearly so miraculous as that. We usually text, or plain old call a person before Skyping them. Because that’s how good Skype is: You have to be vetted for it. A Skype without preface is an unsolicited ring on a doorbell. It’s a surprise hand in your bathroom, offering you TP. If you spy a green bubble on Skype, all you’re seeing is a user who forgot to change their availability status.
Maybe it’s the (relative) infrequency of our usage that (still) grants Skype its appeal. Other people, I know, use it much, much more. A college-aged family friend of ours has to be back home in her dorm room at 11 o’clock every night, the time when her parents Skype her to make sure she is. When I was in college, I never had to suffer through anything like that, though I imagine in 15 years or so I’ll understand the idea.
But are the parents any happier for it? It’s a question I don’t have an answer to, but I thought my dad might. They aren’t, he told me. The way you handle sending your kids to college is by sending your kids to college, letting them figure it out and hoping they come out in one piece at the end of four years.
There are no guarantees, he added.
It’s a testament to Skype that my father, who has no Facebook account, will use it. Outside of his credit union, my dad doesn’t bother with much requiring an account. He’s the kind of dad who reads thick biographies and pays his taxes in February. The kind of dad who recycles, a lot. Only this morning he taught me how to refinance a mortgage. Of course Dad doesn’t subscribe to Facebook, which was what I used to think before learning he silently lurks on my mother’s account.
Skype’s not conducive to silent lurking. With it, everything’s on the table. Skype demands all your attention, something I can start to resent a bit. There are no secrets on Skype—a real opportunity, depending on how you look at it, for trust-building. Whoever’s face is floating inside my computer is inherently trusting they’ll be spared my bathroom activity; my inspections of my own eyebrows; my pulling various snack foods out of the cupboard, frowning at them and putting them back.
I’ll say this for Skype, though: It’s real-time, and that means something. My cousin is online dating and is increasingly frustrated by it. He says he likes to use the Internet to meet girls but then skip to the next step as quickly as possible because he trusts his own judgment best, and why waste time? But routinely, when he picks up the phone, there’s no answer. A lukewarm text usually follows two to 10 minutes later. (I know what you’re thinking, and I do feel the need here to defend family honor. So, to the extent I can stress this without it sounding weird, my cousin is quite the catch. Any one of you’s welcome to Skype him, for proof.)
The only time I’ve ever not fully loved having Skype was when my husband was deployed to Afghanistan—and then it was 99 percent love, 1 percent less-than-love. There’s a de-romanticization of the war zone with fewer letters and more real-time updates on each other’s Chicken Invader scores—though it is worth noting that the Skype connection I had from Northern Virginia to Bagram Air Base was better than the one I usually get to my aunt’s house 30 miles away in Maryland.
By the way, my husband did return home safe, and we’re doing better than ever. Skype and I are. I spend more time on it than I do on the actual phone. Next week I’m even starting language lessons on Skype, something I can’t imagine ever doing via cellphone or landline, though of course people have.
With Skype, though, I can tell so much from my tutor already, indicators that tell me we’re going to get along fine:
• She has a Skype account;
• She has no profile picture; and
• She is a yellow dot, most of the time.