Yet another call
I remember Skyping1 friends back in 2011 from my dorm room in Raleigh, North Carolina. I’d enjoy long video conversations with family and friends living abroad in South Korea, Poland, Spain, or Italy. It was a joyful and disconnecting experience.
Since then, we’ve seen how the massive adoption of online communication tools—instant messages, email, social media, phone calls, video meetings—has homogenized how we interact with each other, a phenomenon accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic that also made Skype lose a great part of its market share to Zoom12.
For the past two years, in-person wasn’t an option, so the talks, podcast interviews, and meetings that would have otherwise been in person happened in front of a screen.
Even the moments meant to relax and disconnect became yet another call.
Skype was released in August 2003 by Swedish and Danish business partners Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, also known for co-founding the peer-to-peer file-sharing application KaZaA. Back then, you could call other Skype early adopters in your social circle or make cheap international landline calls. ↩ ↩
Zoom's Success During the Pandemic Came at Skype's Expense. PCMAG. Retrieved 30 May 2022. ↩
