Why isn't Johnny using Video?

I have just read a fascinating article in CIMI's Netwatcher (a subscription-only newsletter which unfortunately I cannot share here) on video, presence and social networks. The starting point is the contention that video is not really taking off and Netwatcher sees this as reflecting deeply engrained attitudes to voice vs video. From the age of two, we start using at-a-distance audio devices (phones) and at-a-distance visual devices (TVs); but phone conversations are two-way and broadly similar to face to face conversations, whereas TV interaction is typically one way and the people that can be seen are (usually) in high display mode (i.e. well dressed, well groomed and very focus on how their visual appearance is coming over). So, Netwatcher argues, we are deeply worried about video catching us unaware and, despite the fact that we are highly visual animals, we are not rushing to use video everywhere (even the webcam I bought for my kids only got used for a few weeks).

So is that the end of the story? Not really. Looking at social networks, it is clear that people really do value the visual. Everyone wants to see a photo of the individual on the person's homepage and most people do this. People are also keen on others sharing photos and videos about what they are talking about rather than just giving the information in text. Netwatcher's argument then seems to go off in two directions at this point. One is about video and suggests that if we want to encourage people to move towards video, we have to include a visual element from the start. So if the norm was that you saw a still picture of our interlocutor, then people would start to want a live image or maybe some form of modified video-enabled interaction (e.g. you can only see the person's face or in some situations you get an avatar etc).So their claim is that for video to work you have to start in a visual context and sustain a visual aspect through the interaction. (And I suppose you have to move towards a world where people are more used to seeing less prepared- for-TV-type images - just as Twitter etc prepares people for less made-for-broadcast text).

The other line of argument is that we need to link presence much more to relationships and policies. Here they criticise social network sites for not really developing the kinds of capabilities that people really want, which is a platform that structures my relationships in a relatively complicated way and enables me to link policies to those relationships in a highly fine-grained way. So instead of just having contacts and contacts of contacts, we would have work contacts and personal contacts and close friends, friends, acquantances, friends of friends etc. Then we could set policies that reflected the reality of our preferences, e.g. photos of my kids might be accessible only to personal contacts and within them only to family and close friends. This then links to presence because I don't necessarily want all of my facebook friends to be able to contact me at any time of day or night nor indeed do most of us over the age of 21 have no wish to discriminate between "friends" in terms of what we share about our current mode or our feelings about our neighbour (or our government or our employer etc).

The punchline I suppose is that if we did have social networking platforms that better reflected the complexities of our lives and our relationships, then we could link our video interactions to these platforms and video could take off. So when a business contact calls, he initially sees my avatar and then I realise it is my boss, I can click him through to a live image of my face without a context (or in a neutral, synthesized context) or if I feel comfortable with and the context allows (!) a live feed of me in the real context I happen to be in. Netwatcher makes the point that no one seems to be actively building towards this kind of world, but its an interesting argument both about what needs to happen for video to take off and about where social networking should be heading if we want to go beyond current models that are going to run into problems as the platforms find more and more ways to increase the number of our apparent friends.