A friend and I had a nice, long Skype conversation the other day. It was also deep, meaningful, and emotional, but that's not germane to this post. The amazing fact of being able to have a phone-like conversation, across multiple time zones (or not: she could have been in the next room but pretending that she was in Kansas; or it could have been a metaphor) is still something that continues to amaze me. My previous experiences with Skype had not been auspicious; trying to use Skype on a laptop without a headset is a recipe for a disastrous conversation. Or three or four disastrous conversations, because you'll hear everything several times over.
This time, though, I was ready. I had a Shure large-diaphragm condenser microphone connected by a phase-inverting cable (aka XLR) to a mixer with a noise-reduction plug-in, in-ear monitors, and port forwarding. The only problem with this is that you're not quite sure whether to have a conversation or wait for the rest of the band to show up. Seriously, it feels very odd not to be clutching a handset. My senior tutor at Oxford has just gotten the hang of not holding the transducer to his ear and shouting into the telephone; he should get the hang of Skype in another thirty years' time. Meanwhile, conversations take on a certain performance aspect by the simple fact that one is one is standing before a microphone and pop-screen, and so, despite the fact that Skype is free, you feel the need to say something of Great Importance. Our next project is to attempt a three-way conversation with one of our male friends, who is generally into three-ways as a matter of course.
The other strange thing I've had to content with recently is paranoia that my phone is spying on me. 3G has many benefits; positive ones include the ability to check Gmail on the fly, but being able to locate you to tell you where the nearest cinema is can be somewhat disconcerting, and I'm sure can equally well be used to locate me for purposes other than to sell me Odeon tickets. It usually ticks away in silent mode (the official reason is that I find the ringing of a mobile phone intrusive, but I suspect it's actually a subconscious fear of unpopularity and I don't like to hear the absence of people calling me). Once in a while, though, it will suddenly flash into life for no discernible reason. Has someone hacked it and taken a picture of me typing away in my knickers? I've taken to wrapping it in swaddling cloth and burying it under the weight of the Complete Works of Byron. For someone who spends so much time with microphones and imaging gadgetry, being at home means being unseen and unheard, and the freedom, should I wish to do such a thing (but not that I would do such a thing, really) to stride naked across the room singing hit songs from the '90s.
