Communication is really the thing to do on the internet, isn't it? When we want to send a message to our friends or family, chances are, we'll use some service on the internet to do it. You might pull up a messenger app like Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, Wechat, or some others like that. These days, everyone is using their phone to do it.

Recently, there was a teacher that used a messenger app to send a private message to her partner with an uncouth joke about one of her students. Although the message was private, it was read and interpreted by an AI bot, which then contacted the FBI and ratted her out. How about them apples? No privacy in your conversations on standard messenger services, it seems.

One solution to this problem is encryption. That's why I prefer to use the Signal app for messaging. Everything you send and receive is encrypted, end-to-end. You can thus expect some level of privacy there. Getting your friends and family to change how they chat with you, however, is a different matter. People are stuck in their ways, always reaching for what's familiar. It's a wonder that anything ever changes, day by day.

At one point, friends chatted with each other using MSN Messenger. Some people used ICQ. Some people used Yahoo Messenger. It was also common to chat with friends using Skype. Actually, if you wanted to have a video call with someone, Skype was the thing to use. If you look at videos from the last century of people imagining what the future is like, everyone thought that video calls would be the future - every call would be video. Voice only would be a thing of the past, that's what people thought. There's a scene in "Back to the Future" where McFly has a video call with his boss, in which he gets fired. Subsequently, the message of getting fired is transmitted to him in numerous mediums in a dramatic fashion. Of course, these days printing things on paper is much out of style. There's a tendency to do all our reading on screens, these days.

To think of where we are today - if I wanted to get a video call with a family member, it would be an undertaking. We'll have to choose a service that offers video calls. We'll both need to get signed in there, one of us would find the other's contact, we'll navigate the app and get a video call going. You can do video calls also with Signal, so that's a good choice, but still. Compare this process with just making a normal phone call. Open your phone, tap the phone app, start a call. Is it that the integration is more seamless, or is it just that we're more used to making normal phone calls than video calls? Maybe also that you need to choose a service to have a video call with someone, whereas with a phone call there's nothing of the sort. If video calls were seamlessly integrated into our phone service, would they be more common place?

It's not like why couldn't make that happen with today's technology. We could make video calls the standard way of calling. Just imagine, you select your contact, start your phone call, and the video starts just like that. Instead of making extra efforts to get video working for your call, it would be the opposite - you'd have to make efforts to disable video for your call.

Imagine how that would change things as far as how people communicate with each other. Phone calls might feel more personal, intimate. People would want to wait to get freshened up and look presentable before having a phone call. Without video, you might be relaxed in your appearance and not bother to fix your hair. The thing is though, when you are not freshened up, it will affect your call even without video. Making video calls the default might do us a world of good then.

Change doesn't come easily, however. People are stuck in their ways. Maybe what we need is a revolution. A video call revolution. Some flash point that suddenly makes video calls in high demand. Then it can reach to a point where people would think, if you want to talk to me, you need to show your face. It makes sense - there's more to communication than what we can express with our voice. We also communicate with our hands, our face, and our eyes. Think of all that's lost in communication even by writing. Depending on which word is stressed when a sentence is spoken, the meaning can change completely. The same can be true when speaking without video. The meaning of what you say can change completely depending on the look on your face or what you are doing with your hands. Like to say, "Hey, good morning, how are you today?" and if you say that with a smile on your face and your palm facing out, that gives a much different message than if you would say the same thing but you take an aggressive fighting stance. It could be that people are shy, and they don't want to communicate with any greater depth. Even this post, if you read it, more more could be communicated if I were to record it with an audio clip. Still more would be communicated if it were on video. I wonder if it could be taken a step further. Video is flat. What if the 3d model of yourself were transmitted to the other end, and reconstructed for the person talking to you? Could we communicate with a greater richness of depth by doing that?

Just imagine. What if video calls aren't the future of communicating at all? What if the future of communication is virtual reality? Phone calls could fall out of style altogether. No more phone calls, no more video calls. If you want to talk to someone, you'd both enter your virtual reality environment and there you both would be, as if you are in person together. What would that mean for your mobile phone? If people stopped calling each other, and nobody used the "phone" functionality anymore, because everyone would rather communicate in VR instead?