videophony: the mask of earnest attention

Manufactured sincerity as consumer product, cast in polybutylene resin. Video callers, horrified that their real faces looked "evasive, furtive, untrustworthy, unlikable," buy masks whose whole selling point is a fabricated look of earnest, total attention — the exact expression that in person signals I mean this, I'm all here with you, now available as hardware on a Velcro strap. Earnestness gets externalized into a mold precisely because nobody trusts their own face to produce it convincingly; the sincere-attentive look becomes a thing you hang on a hook by the phone. It's the same trick n110's Strategy #7 runs vocally and 128's Saprogenic Greetings runs on stationery — the affect of caring, mass-produced and detached from anyone actually caring.