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The Hostage Negotiation of the Front-Facing Camera
There is a comforting, tactile safety in the old fashioned way of using a phone. You press the phone to your ear, the device emitting a heat signature that's instantly grounding. This heated device creates a seal of warmth and assurance. It is an act of self preservation. No one is staring at you. No one is gauging how your looks contrast with their put together appearance. The voice on the other end vibrates against your skull. It is intimate. It is not awkward. It is, though, apparently extinct.
I was settled in my bed yesterday, the pillows arranged in the perfect architectural way to decompress my spine. I was ready, and eager, to talk to an older Black man we will call Shane. Shane is an older talkative man, a man in his early sixties. He is highly intelligent. One of his unsung skills is schooling anybody in a mathematical confrontation. Shane, though, like so many sighted people, possess the baffling inability to understand that I still exist if they are not actively perceiving me with their eyes.
It happened thirty seconds into the conversation.
The interruption was a sharp chirp from VoiceOver that sounded like an intrusion. "Video call engaged."
I didn’t accept a video invitation. I never do, but he switched it on from his end, and suddenly, my audio sanctity was breached.
"I can't see you," Shane complained immediately. His southern Mississippi accent, which was rich, heavenly, and blessedly close to my ear, was now a tinny distant approximation of a voice that didn’t even have enough weight to make my apartment echo.
"I know you can't," I say, refusing to participate in the madness. "My lights are off."
"Well," he says, like I'm depriving him of a vital organ, "Turn the lights on. Its pitch black!"
"Shane," I said, summoning a patience I did not feel, "I am blind. Why would I have the lights on?"
This is the first hurtle in the obstacle course that is the video call. Sighted people think that lights, and by extension, visual perception, is a moral imperative. They always forget that, for me, lights and light switches are a vestigial organ. They do not have functions in my apartment. They are only there for the sighted people that come into my apartment. I do not need them. I never needed them.
But lets say, for the sake of argument, I surrender, just for a minute. Lets say I get up and turn the lights on for a visual interpreter service to identify a specific can of soup, or maybe I wanted to triple check to see if I wasn’t about to brush my teeth with hydrocortisone cream.
The lights are on. We have cleared the lighting hurtle.
Now we enter the seventh circle of hell—the make the sighted man comfortable phase.
"I still can't see you!" he says, panic in his voice like I'm about to walk off a cliff. "I still can't see you right. Move the camera up. No, to the leff. You're cuttin' off your face. Its only your forehead. I can only see your forehead."
Now, I have to remove my phone from its comfortable spot—a space where I could actually hear his rich tone—and I must participate in unnatural arm movements so that I position the front facing camera just so, like I'm offering a sacrifice to a deity I do not believe in.
This is pure fucking hell. To satisfy the video requirement, I must hold the phone out in front of me at an awkward, uncomfortable, and an impossibly rigid angle out in front of me, where the party also now has to raise their voice in order to be heard because of the distance, turning this phone call—once a beacon of calming intellectual conversation into a painful posture. My deltoid starts to burn. I am no longer a participant in the conversation. I am an unwilling cameraman, shooting an obscure documentary about my own face.
"That's perfect," he says, "Hold it right there!"
Except it isn't perfect. This is terrible. The sound is atrocious because I have to hold the phone two inches away from my face. I am unable to make this sound better because I do not have earbuds for phone calls. The earbud microphone is never sustainable enough for a lasting phone conversation. I cannot wear my Bluetooth headset that would solve my audio problem because it does not have a microphone. My Bluetooth headset is only for listening to books and silencing the outside world.
I do not have a standing microphone because I still believe in the sanctity of an audio call. I am physically capable of holding the phone up to my ear. I do not need an external microphone.
I have to work twenty times as hard to parse his words through the airy distortion of the speakerphone.
And God forbid I move.
If I shift my weight to get even a little bit comfortable and relieve the cramp in my shoulder, the video on his end instantly gets distorted because I am not a robot. If I reach for my water bottle, my face tilts out of frame and the panic instantly settles in.
"Oh, You're gone! I can't see you no more! Where did you go?"
"Shane, I didn’t _go_ anywhere. I am right here. I did not teleport. I am still in the same spot I was just a few seconds ago."
But for sighted people, object permanence seems to rely entirely on a video feed. Sighted people cannot have a conversation with me unless they are watching my pixelated mouth moving. If sighted people cannot track my pixelated mouth moving, then I have vanished into the ether. I no longer exist in time and space if sighted people cannot watch my pixelated mouth formulate syllables and sentences.
I try to explain this. I try to argue for the efficiency of the audio channel. "I don’t want to do video," I say, my voice tender, trying to appeal to reason. "Let's just talk audibly. We can still talk. Put the phone back up to your ear."
But its always as if I hadn’t uttered a single vowel.
"But I want to _see_ you," they protest, utterly baffled that a sensory experience is actively being denied to the sighted person.
I do not understand video calls. I honestly don’t. What are you getting out of a video call and watching someone's mouth move? Do you really need to see my hair remain stationary to grasp the joy in my voice as I gush about a TV show I enjoyed last week? Are you incapable of understanding me without staring at my sightless eyes? blue eyes that are never looking at you, by the way.
Do you need to see the pores of my white skin to grasp the gushing over a book I listened to yesterday narrated by the fabulously dashing Gabriel Michael or equally enchanting, Utterly engrossingly delectable Sean Crisden?
Are you checking to see if I've wiped my face after dinner? Because if that's the case, tell me I have crumbs on my chin and then let me go back to the dark. Tell me I have cream cheese in my beard and then let me go back to the darkness.
But this obsession with video isn't just social, its systemic. Its why sighted people can't listen to podcasts or an audiobook without visual invasion.
This is the same baffling logic corporate executives use when they wanna demand that people keep their cameras on during meetings. They can't just _trust_ their employees, so they must surveillance them. They claim its about engagement, but we all know better. Its about tracking. Its about surveillance that monitors eye contact so they can have data that says we are engaged and that we are listening.
I know—I know—there are a _billion_ other people like me. People that could pay attention and work infinitely better if they were allowed to exist in their own bodies comfortably.
I listen best when I'm horizontal, body and limbs relaxed, with a comfortable pair of noise headphones on, perhaps typing amazingly fast on a Bluetooth keyboard—my auditory sense attuned to everything happening across digital wires. That doesn’t _look_ like engagement to a sighted person though, because they’ve never tried to understand bodies other than their own. Its why, even today, sighted people still think we dictate to our computers instead of using complex keyboard commands to control a powerful screen reader.
Sighted managers don’t understand why I do not need to have video on to pay attention, so they force me, and so many millions of others like me, to sit upright in a chair, staring at pixelated heads I cannot see, performing attentiveness but actually absorbing less.
Video calls are an assault on my autonomy. They transform a conversation into a staged performance. They demand I stage manage my environment, my lighting, my posture, all for a medium that I cannot access. It is a demand that is not equal. It is not an equal playing field. It is a demand that I perform sightedness for your comfort.
And the real tragedy is, we are sacrificing something better.
There is a purity to audio that sighted people ignore. When you and I are having an audio call, ear to receiver, I am listening to everything. I'm paying attention to the micro tremors in your voice. I am appreciating your radiant smile without ever having to visually perceive it. I am understanding the hesitation—the small breath you take before you admit to me that you're scared. I am listening to _you_ instead of judging your lighting or the aesthetic qualities of your furniture.
Actually, you know what I love more than an audio phone call? Audio messages.
I love receiving audio messages. Audio messages, especially ones where people are recording as they are participants in the world, allow me to be with you in a way an audio phone call can never replicate because of a phone calls subpar quality.
Audio messages are the perfect medium. I love them. They aren’t in real time, so there's no pressure to perform. I can listen to your mood—that glorious rant about your boss, and I can understand your frustration in crisp stereo sound quality. I can enjoy how you sound when you are comforted by weighted blankets on your bed. I can play the message over again so that I don’t forget what we were talking about before life gets in the way. I can play your audio message to help me fall asleep—appreciating the fabrics of your vocal registers, your tone, the way your diction elongates vowels when you're feeling safe from the world. I can hold those audio expressions in my memory forever.
So, this is a plea.
Audio call me without video.
Better yet? Send me audio messages. Send me long, rambly, audio messages with soundscapes and audible expressions of love and joy. Remain in the dark by continuing that audio phone call rather than switching to video. Resist the urge to enable video. Bathe in the intimacy of my tone, rather than trying to observe a pixelated mouth form syllables.
The next time you want to enable video, stop and ask yourself, is Robert's voice enough?"
Because in my vast audio world, I do not need to see you. I have you, and I have your voice. That, to me, will never be lacking. Your voice will always be enough. I do not need video, and I never will need video.
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If you enjoyed this rant, you might enjoy the fiction podcast Seen And Not Heard by Caroline Mincks
