You and Your Webcams
If I really wanted to see you, I’d come over to your house. We’d order pizza. We’d watch a movie. You could kick my ass at Scrabble, because nothing’s funnier than kicking the English major’s ass at Scrabble. But then I’d smoke you in Risk just to prove you don’t know everything about strategy.
And if I want to hear your voice, I’ll call you. I’ll kick back in my chair with a beer in hand and we can chat about the latest news. But don’t hold your breath. You know how often I call my mother? I’ve been in England for six months now and called her twice. On the same day. Because it was an emergency. Phones are evil. You can do everything online these days, including ordering pizza. The odds are, I really don’t want to talk to you on the phone.
So if I’m online chatting or emailing with you, we can assume it’s because I don’t want to see you or hear your voice. So the webcam you’re trying to shove down my broadband connection? Ain’t cool. Shut it off.
And those of you who insist on taking pictures with your webcam and emailing them to me? Buy a freaking digital camera! All these camera-perched-on-the-monitor shots from a weird angle in a badly lit room? What is wrong with you? Do you think you look good in these pictures? You look like a seventeen year old idiot or a sexual predator. And cheap! You look cheap!
Buy a real digital camera. Or find a friend with a camera you can borrow. Hell, you can even take pictures on regular cameras and develop them. The technology to do so still exists, you know. You don’t even have to have a scanner—they’ll save your photos to disk for you.
Nothing says “I think I understand digital culture, but I’m really just a poser” like webcam pictures. Or “I’m too cheap to buy a real camera, too embarrassed about what I’m doing to ask anyone to help me take a good picture, and too stupid to realize that this is completely transparent in this dumb webcam picture I’m using.”
Webcams. They were only cool when they were pointed at a coffee pot, and that was so long ago the coffee pot has moved and left no forwarding address. You are not a coffee pot and nobody cares what you look like while you’re typing on your computer.