Josh Silverman: how the video changes everything

Josh Silverman is the head of Skype. This post was published on the popular GigaOm.com technology blog.

Whether it ’s the Jimmy Tajik video clip , overshadowing the soundtracks of Indian films, or a friend’s wedding in 8 time zones from you, or working alongside callouts from other countries, all this is a video. And that changes the way we communicate with each other.

Video technologies have become so ubiquitous that we rarely stop to think about what they can mean to us, both positively and negatively . I will focus on the more pleasant side of their development.
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Take Skype. You can look at video calls as a natural extension of voice calls: the transition from narrowband to broadband. But it seems to us that there is something more than just more intensive communication. Voice calls, ultimately, most often boil down to some kind of information exchange: You told me that, I told you that. Until! This is a rather difficult way, and often we do not get anything from such communication except for the effective exchange of information.

By the way, I do not belittle the value of voice calls as such. I agree with who said that radio is television for the brain. But in terms of communication, voice and video are just two different “beasts”.

With a video, people can suddenly be present without being physically in the same room. And so it turns out that it ceases to be simply the exchange of information. When my friend celebrated the fortieth anniversary in Ann Arbor, Michigan, I joined the party, being in London, on a video call. The distance between us has disappeared - an advantage that a voice call cannot give. A similar effect is produced by the constantly included video-panel, which unites our offices in Tallinn and Prague: the table of the engineer in Estonia stands right next to the workplace of his colleague in the Czech Republic.

The video is changing the very nature of what it means to be there - now it's something between audio and physical presence. (The three-dimensional holographic video, on which other companies and researchers are working, gives an even greater immersive effect, but so far this has not yet become publicly available). In other words, a live video chat is not just a call with a picture. This is not just a milestone in the evolution of the Internet. It's just a completely different way to communicate.

For hundreds of thousands of years, people have been sharing meanings through language. His forms of existence were evolved from oral to visual, and in the last few thousand years we have been dealing with writing. But before the 20th century, conversations either required the participants to be in one place physically or were separated in time (letters). And then, only a personal meeting created the conditions for a rich, complete communication. Live video calls change this by combining oral, visual, and written tradition in a virtual presence.

It's funny that this progress means that we can finally return to the simplest - that which has worked for centuries (but could not overcome space or time). Or, if we take the wording of the Institute for the Study of the Future (IFTF), we observe “the birth of a new society of oral communication through digital means ( digitally-mediated oral society )”. And in any case, live video in real time brings us closer to the situation when the means of communication becomes almost invisible, allowing the people themselves to be the “platform” of communication.

Easy to roll in hyperbole. Therefore, treat with skepticism my words about the virtual presence, which simulates a tangible reality, saves time and shortens the distance with the help of video calls. Take with skepticism the fact that the IFTF says that a new oral society creates a new public space . Do not forget that these are still only very early steps. But video already allows Skype users to overcome space and time using both computers and TVs with Skype support, and today approximately 4% of all international calls are Skype video calls. Even if no revolutionary changes occur, we will at least see a live network of video communications between people, which anyone can enter, no matter where he is or what device he uses. And even this is already very cool.

Video is not just a completely different way to communicate, but also a very important way.