Video Chat Is Terrible and About to Get Much Worse
The technology ignores everything we know about how great conversation actually works
Video chat has every appearance of being a solid win for human communication. It’s useful for companies with far-flung employees and for distant friends and family. With social media becoming ever more fractious, it seems like seeing and talking to a real person on video chat offers some hope for maintaining some humanness in our online conversations.
But here’s the thing: The newest innovations in video chat are making conversations between groups worse by combining the bleakest of online and real-life worlds. The two biggest providers of free group video chat, Google and Apple, have built software reinforcing some of the obnoxious dynamics of real-life group meetings — including sexism and racism.
The idea, in theory, is that it makes it possible to focus on the person speaking. But it also rewards the loudest person in the room.
One of the main features coded into Google Hangouts and Apple’s new Group FaceTime is that when someone is talking, their image becomes really big. Those who aren’t talking become small. The idea, in theory, is that it makes…
