Facetime

The newest in new technology is Facetime, the video chat system on the IPhone 4 which -in theory- lets you talk to compadres across the country, across town or across the world using the IPhone's WiFi capabilities.   It's a pretty cool system and the reason I finally moved into the 21st century and bought myself a real smart-phone.   Now I'm not giving up the BlackBerry, I would rather give up my left hand, but I have in three short weeks thrown myself completely into this 'new' Apple craze.   

This Facetime option seemed too good to pass up and a few days ago I had my first Facetime Faceoff and let me tell you, it was more than a bit awkward.   My buddy 'called' me and we kind of had this uncomfortable few minutes of face-to-face conversation while both watching Monday Night Football.   Now it's not that the system didn't work -it was near flawless- but what it does do is make for the most uncomfortable few minutes of your life.    The beauty of being on the phone is that the other person DOESN'T have to look at you, you can take a piss, brush your teeth, scratch your nuts or turn on porn but now with this concept of Big Brother hanging over you, it was as if I couldn't do anything.   When you are watching a football game with your friend you aren't staring at his mug the entire time, that would be incredibly weird but with this new media that is exactly what you are expected to do.    What Apple didn't realize is that this does not make for a normal social setting, nobody ever looks at another person the entire time when they are speaking, especially if it's two dudes trying to relax after a hectic day.

But even more frightening is the fact that the way Facetime is set up is that you see both the image of the other person but also a smaller image of yourself and I do not have to tell you that looking at yourself is mind-numbingly weird. 

The issue is that some of us don't have perfectly symmetrical shaped heads and when I look at the twisted image of myself I start to notice my one eye being about a 1/4 of an inch higher in my face than the other one.  It's like I'm the fat male version of Shannon Doherty and it is completely distracting

After about 45 seconds we both decided that we are better as normal phone friends and turned the cameras to broadcast from the back of the phone (IPhone 4 having two cameras) so we didn't have to sit there looking at one another.