the rise and fall of videophony

At every fork, the consumer chooses the flattering unreality over the real contact. Faced with their own faces on-screen — "untrustworthy, unlikable," Nixon in the debates — callers don't learn to tolerate the truth; they buy masks, then better masks, then masks frankly handsomer than themselves, then abandon their bodies entirely for a celebrity's still photograph. The market obligingly supplies each rung of the retreat. What's being trained here is the reflex the Entertainment will exploit: a population that would rather interface with an idealized image than with another person, that has learned to prefer the enhanced representation to the flawed actual. The audience for a lethal image is built one vanity-purchase at a time, each one teaching the same lesson — the screen-self is better than the real self, so live inside the screen.