Skype Love

“It is an interesting question — what one tries to do, in writing a letter — partly of course to give back a reflection of the other person.” So wrote tireless correspondent Virginia Woolf to her friend Gerald Brenan, on October 4, 1929. Now all it takes to capture an accurate reflection of someone far away is a Skype account. This raises another interesting question — what are we trying to do when we Skype?

Skype is the most popular and sexiest form of VoIP, or Voice over Internet Protocol — a technology that allows any computer with a broadband Internet connection to act as a telephone. Skype was created in 2003 by the same Danish and Swedish entrepreneurs and Estonian software developers who created Kazaa (a file-sharing program similar to Napster). Since then, Skype has taken the communications world by storm: as of April 2008, it had more than 309 million registered accounts.

Its popularity is no mystery: anyone can download the software for free, and talk to anyone else with Skype, anywhere in the world, also for free. This includes the option of video conferencing. (Skype makes most of its money from people who “SkypeOut,” buying credit that lets them Skype land lines or mobiles for as little as 2.1 cents a minute.)

The technology has created a wave of Skype Love, which means millions of romantic partners around the world can live in different cities, countries, and time zones and not actually be separated, as long as they have a computer with an Internet connection, a microphone, and a webcam. The sound quality is not always the best — it ranges from a cut above the telephone to echoey or garbled — but there is something comforting in its retrograde tinniness (like jazz on a crackly LP). And who can argue with no long-distance charges and no maintenance fees?

For the past year and a half, I’ve depended on Skype to stay in touch with my girlfriend, a writer and translator who has been based in Vilnius, Lithuania, while I move around from Canada to Europe to the Middle East to, most recently, the Caucasus, doing research for a new book. In a Skypeless world, we might have been less inclined to hang in there, but now separation is less challenging. To be able to see her, and for her to see me, is more satisfying than a telephone call, email, instant message, or letter; the silences are more comfortable, the flow of conversation more natural. The image of my girlfriend’s face and the familiar environment — her piles of poetry, her thick Lithuanian dictionary, a white tunic she bought in Rajasthan — conjure up so many other sensory associations (her smell, her touch) that sometimes I feel we’re in the same room. It’s a strange and modern feeling: to be so intimate and yet so far apart.

According to Skype’s “Users Online” status, there are millions of us out there at any given moment of the day, sitting in front of our computers for two, three, sometimes ten hours at a time, gazing into the pixellated eyes of our beloved. (So far, people have Skyped for more than 100 billion minutes.) Obviously,this makes being apart less lonely. But has it brought people closer? Does it make us better lovers? Does sitting in front of a webcam free us up to talk more intimately? And what the hell do we talk about so often for so long?

Me: Hey.
She: Hey.
Me: How’s it going?
She: It’s going.

A long pause. A really long pause — not awkward, just adjusting to Skype Reality: volume, screen angle, the pleasure of seeing.

Me: You look really nice today.