SHortly after my mother’s 89th birthday, I called her fixed via Skype. It was our last communication of this type. Don’t worry, mom is fine. Skype, however, is as dead as The terrible wolf. Deadher, probably, because no one is trying to understand how to bring Skype back. My mother was born before humans discover how to use antibiotics and she always goes. Skype was born in 2003 and only succeeded 20 years.
Technological change is inevitable, but given the current maniac rhythm of innovation, we are more used to living this as the arrival of new brilliant tools, not at the start of useful old (although slightly simplistic). At the birth of my grandmother, there were no planes. At the birth of my mother, there were no transistors. When I was born, there were no mobile phones. These technologies are always strong. In 2019, Skype was declared One of the 10 best most downloaded applications of the 2010s, above Tiktok and YouTube and Twitter. It’s only six years ago. Since then, I have not been to the gynecologist.
Is there a word for the feeling of loss you feel when you overcome a technology that has changed your life? I know that some people feel enough nostalgia for Blackberries and Sony Ride And even horseshoe That they have become collectible, but when the software takes place, what remains? How to commemorate and cry a series of zeros and zeros that have opened a whole new world to us?
I was just old enough when Skype came on the horizon to really appreciate it. As a traveler and expatriate, I made a lot of long -distance phone calls. One way to reach lovers, family and friends when you need it, long -distance calls had their own kind of romance, especially if you like to have a conversation where each sentence you cost you – and sometimes the person you talked about – about two dollars. It made you measure your words. If your father was particularly frugal, as mine was, you would never even try to sing “happy birthday to you”, for example, for fear of ruining all his year.
In fact, what the long -distance call is often was long breaks when people were trying to think of things to say that were worth money. In my family, we could not evoke such rich conversations fairly quickly, so we would exchange jokes, hang up, then we cursed to waste money on such a call. The friends of mine took notes before requesting maximum efficiency. In some countries that I have visited, you had to pay for a certain number of minutes first, put the number you wanted to call, then sit on a cabin and wait to be connected. The pressure to fill these prepaid minutes with valid content was intense.
Skype was not the only solution to that. There were briefly specialized international call companies where you could choose one or two countries and call them for a good business rate, let’s say, 20 cents per minute. (A large part of my telephone conversation with my father at that time was devoted to wonder with him how cheap it was.) But Skype was one of the oldest and easiest to use, and she called the fixed lines for a few cents, so if you could not remove the hands of your old beloved from their hands, it was a boon. A small conversation was possible! You could digress yourself! You could sing everything “happy birthday to you” and do halfway “because he is a good happy guy” before realizing that you did not fail to sing as much as you thought.
Invented in 2003 by billions of northern Europeans now millionaires, Skype, which used the Internet rather than telephone lines to connect people, was sold in Ebay in 2005, and finally finished in Microsoft, which withdraws it in favor of the teams. As technology does, it is a familiar cycle: innovation, monetization, ruin. Skype is like this Alt-Rock group whose live concert was the first you have ever seen, but which continued to change brand and finally dissolved. At least with a concert tour, you get a t-shirt. All we have Skypers is a bubble of blue vestige on our phones.
Perhaps the attraction of Skype at least technologically informed was what condemned him. I only used Skype for one thing: to call my mother’s fixed line. I did not use it for messaging or video. He offered translation and payments and overhangs, which I ignored. I bristled when he briefly started to send me daily news. I recognize my complicity in his disappearance. For me, Skype was like the Boost button on my mother’s phone, which increases the volume; He had a limited but crucial utility.
Now Skype has gone. Although each of her descendants tried to make him use one of the communication methods invented after 1876, my mother always wants to recover the receiver of a phone sounds, as she always did. For her, the zoom is what cars do and facetiming is what people called to come for a cup of tea. I will now call it (free of charge) through one of the other applications, which is only slightly more complicated and allows it to keep its feet planted in the technological era in which it feels safe.
But it has the impression that the distance widens, that the rubber cord between us reaches the external limit of its stretch. As digital communication becomes more sophisticated, it seems older, more distant, less accessible. I can see and hear everyone clearly, but mom is just a whisper. And I can’t help but worry that these are not only inventions that cannot continue to abandon earlier – it’s the people. I know Skype was just a step, and plug in his disappearance, it’s like wishing that cocoons have never become butterflies, but I would still have liked a t-shirt.