David Foster Wallace was clever in his forethought here, though the reasons video calls have largely fallen out of favor in the real world may be different.

“Within like 16 months or 5 sales quarters, the tumescent demand curve collapsed like a kicked tent, so that by the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, fewer than 10 percent of all private telephone communications utilized any video image fiber data transfers … the average US phone user deciding that s/he actually preferred the retrograde old low-tech Bell-era voice-only phone interface after all. … Audio-only phone conversations allowed you to presume that the person on the other end was paying complete attention to you while also permitting you not to have to pay anything even close to complete attention to her ... video telephony rendered the fantasy insupportable.”