For some time, my father and I have been experimenting with using some kind of voice chat, but for some reason, we were never able to get anything to work. And then a week ago, just after I got back from the U.S., we tried Skype, and after working out a few bugs, we got it to work. And it’s great, too–very good sound quality, easy to use.

After using it for just the one week, we’ve discovered something very interesting about it: we use it very differently than we would use our telephones. With a telephone call, we would wait as much as a week or two between calls, and there would have to be more than just a casual reason to call. But with voice chat, it feels different. It feels like an intercom, and that my family is right next door, and not halfway around the globe.

I realized that this morning, when I decided I’d call my dad and just chat about things I wouldn’t have made a phone call for. I’d seen Bill O’Reilly on Letterman, and just felt like commenting on it with him. Particularly on how Letterman, before O’Reilly came out, stirred his pencil in O’Reilly’s coffee mug, and then later reacted when O’Reilly drank from it. And, while we were at it, about Robertson’s yet-another-idiotic-remark event with Sharon’s stroke being God’s punishment for dividing Israel. Stuff we might discuss in the course of a regular telephone conversation, but not enough to trigger a telephone call in the first place.

It’s hard to define why there is a difference. Mechanically, it’s not much different than a telephone; it even uses the same ringing sound effects as a telephone. A call is placed, is answered, and at the end, we hang up. But still, somehow, it feels different. It might be financial–even though our phone plans have gotten international dialing rates down to under ten cents a minute (low enough that we don’t even think about the expense any more), there remains the fact that it does cost money, and the clock is ticking, even if we don’t think about it as consciously as we did before. Kind of like taking photos: with chemical film, I was always conscious of the cost for each photo, and restrained myself from taking more than one or two at a time. But now, with digital cameras and no cost per photo, I snap away incessantly.

Or maybe it’s something as simple as the increased sound quality, capturing more of the ambience of the other side, and giving the other speaker more of a ‘presence,’ as if they were much closer. There was a bit of the same effect, I believe, when international phone lines were improved to the point where sound quality became the same as with local phone calls.

It could be because I’ve set this up only with my family and no one else, so it feels more like a private connection. Or perhaps it’s something as simple as the fact that I was just over there, in the U.S. with my family, and am still in the mode where I feel I can start chatting about anything.

However, I get the feeling that this will be a bit more permanent than that, and maybe it’s due to a combination of all the above factors. I think we’ll be using the telephone a lot less, and this a lot more, despite the limitations. Those limitations include the fact that we can only make calls when both laptops are on and not closed. Also, because of terrible feedback problems, we are forced to use headphones which tether us to the computers, and we can’t move far. Even so, there is something compelling about this kind of communication, closing even further the distance between us.

I compare this to when I first came to live in Japan, when telephone calls cost a few bucks each minute and were of terrible quality, and voice communication was more for emergencies, a luxury we couldn’t much afford. As with so much else, things have changed.