Keeping them in touch

There’s much about the Internet that one can complain about.
Spam, porn, crazy bloggers, misinformation that lives on forever in cyberspace, a decline in the civility of political discourse, bad jokes and kitten videos sent by well-meaning third cousins.
As I said, there’s plenty to complain about.
But video communication isn’t one of them.
Perhaps the greatest treat the Internet offers is to be able to talk to loved ones face-to-face in ways that only seemed to exist in those grainy Bell Laboratories movies that science teachers used to show when there were no other frogs to dissect.
At our house, we use both Skype and the G-mail video system.
Both work fine.
So fine, in fact, that for someone in his 60s it’s all just short of mind-boggling.
For instance, my wife Connie’s sister is currently in Mali, an arid chunk of West Africa.
She’s there as a Fulbright Scholar doing research on African pottery.
She teaches art history at the State University of New York at Stony Brook on Long Island.
And she’s more of a risk-taker than many folks: She took her daughter, a third grader, with her on the trip.
Ordinarily — that is to say, in the olden days — such an adventure would be accompanied by a sense of incredible detachment. Letters would take days or weeks to travel back and forth. Long distance phone conversations would be cost-prohibitive. She and our niece would be there. We would be here.
And we wouldn’t be able to have a real, meaningful conversation until she comes home in late July or early August.
Skype changes that equation entirely.
I’ve lost track of how many times we’ve video-chatted with Connie’s sister and our niece on the computer.
Some days, I’ve come home at lunch time to find my wife in mid-conversation.
They see us. They hear us. We see them. We hear them. And in real time, we talk. At no charge.
Okay, the picture’s less than perfect, but only a real curmudgeon would whine about that.
Or consider our video contact with our daughter, son-in-law, and grandson in Boston.
Any grandparent will tell you that a phone conversation is no substitute for being there. And a video-chat still isn’t comparable to holding the baby in your arms.
But it’s a treat just the same.
Using Google’s video system, we’ve been able to have weekly video conversations lasting a half an hour or more.
Granted that much of the conversation involved simply watching the baby and making purring noises, but still it’s been great.
A couple of weeks ago, our daughter Emily put her laptop on the carpet where she and Julian were playing. He’s crawling now, and when we called out to him the camera in our computer at home delivered our image to the computer on his level on the carpet.
He’d grin, crawl to our image, get dragged back a few feet by his mother, and do it again.
Amazing stuff, almost good enough to forgive the Internet all of its other excesses.[[In-content Ad]]