The rise and fall of videophony — the annular consumer-tech curve

pivotal · UNDATED (early-InterLace TP era; boom collapses within ~16 months; <10% by YDAU)

• When: the early days of InterLace's internetted teleputers — an interval of huge consumer popularity that "WITHIN LIKE 16 MONTHS OR 5 SALES QUARTERS" collapsed; by YDAU fewer than 10% of private calls use video
• What: On InterLace's internetted teleputers (then "little more than high-tech TV sets," with a tap-dancing "intelligent-agent" homuncular icon callers loved), video-telephoning enjoyed a brief craze, then the demand curve "COLLAPSED LIKE A KICKED TENT" (the scene's own capitals), costing precipitant entrepreneurs their shirts and very nearly the Maryland state employees' retirement fund. The cause, in a trivalent nutshell: (1) emotional stress — video destroyed the "bilateral illusion of unilateral attention" that voice-only calls afforded (you could seem attentive while fugue-doodling, never suspecting your callee did the same); (2) physical vanity — callers were horrified by their own blurred, moist-looking, "Nixonian" video-faces (the industry's psych-consultants termed it Video-Physiognomic Dysphoria), spawning High-Definition Masking, then better-than-life masks (Optimistically Misrepresentational Masking), then Transmittable Tableaux (lens-cap dioramas of attractive strangers); and (3) the self-obliterating microeconomics by which each fix undercut the advance, until callers behind their Tableaux were "once again stresslessly invisible" — i.e. back to Bell-era voice-only, now reframed as "a kind of status-symbol of anti-vanity." The career of videophony is the thread's model case of the annular viability-curve (event 1's shape recurring in the market): advance, disadvantage, compensation, curve-closure, "massive shirt-loss for precipitant investors."