Skype takes holiday gatherings to new level
| Sunday, Dec 06 2009 11:53 AM
Last Updated Sunday, Dec 06 2009 11:54 AM
It's quite the tradition for my family to be together during the winter holidays. This Thanksgiving was a bit different.
My sister and brother-in-law live with their two daughters in Tennessee, and there was no way they could head home for the holiday.
Rising airline ticket prices and tough economic times made it impossible for the family to physically be at the same table together.
But where there's a will, there's an information superhighway.
We may have been 2,000 miles apart from one another, but our family was able to celebrate Thanksgiving together, thanks to the six-year-old software application called "Skype."
It allows people to talk to one another using computers. It's completely free to talk to other Skype users. There's a fee to call landline and cell phones. The application also offers users an instant messenger and file transfer features.
But the best part about Skype, in my opinion, is the video conferencing feature. For my family, it saved Thanksgiving.
In less than two minutes, my laptop, web camera and microphone became the centerpiece of our Thanksgiving table and the bridge from Bakersfield to Nashville.
We connected with one another when we began setting the dinner table and didn't disconnect until after a few post-prandial rounds of Guitar Hero and pumpkin pie.
My sister, feeling very home sick, could see the goings-on at the Gonzales house. My parents got to see and talk to their grandkids about school and life in Music City. The kids especially got a kick out of the experience. My nieces squeezed faces together in Nashville to fit on my laptop monitor and take a picture with my niece in Bakersfield.
My family's experience with Skype was exactly what the idealistic creators of the software had hoped to make possible. It was created in 2003 by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, the same guys who created Kazaa in 2001 (the peer-to-peer music and video file sharing application).
The goal was to make communication between people from anywhere in the world easy and free (a shock to my dad who kept asking, "Andrae, how much does this cost?").
Today, Skype is a leading VOIP (voice-over-Internet-protocol) movement and changing the way people make phone calls. Skype is responsible for 8 percent of global international calling minutes. At peak times, there are 20 million users online with Skype. And in the third quarter of 2009, Skype users made 3.1 billion minutes of calls to landlines and mobiles and 27.7 billion minutes in Skype-to-Skype calls, according to the company website.
As Skype Blogger Peter Parkers writes, "Right now, there are 20 million people around the world, saying hello (or bonjour, or hola, or _, or tere) to their parents across continents, having dinner with their spouses from hotel rooms across countries, and keeping an eye on their pets from across town."
At first, I was skeptical of the idea to connect the family through Skype. While I have never been a Luddite, I have never been convinced of any substitute for real social interaction. Face-to-face conversation will never be trumped by a face-to-Facebook conversation.
My thinking changed two weeks ago. Social networking websites and communications software are getting better and better. They will never beat the physical presence of a person, but it's so much better than nothing.
Right before we began to eat Thanksgiving dinner, my dad asked me to lead the family in prayer. Before I did, I took pause to take in the beautiful experience. To my right, my family in Bakersfield. And to my left, on a 15'' computer screen, with their heads down and hands held, my family in Nashville.
My sister and her family won't be home for Christmas either.
But Skype will help make sure we are still together, no matter what.
Andrae Gonzales is a local Latino columnist whose work appears regularly in The Californian. These are the opinions of Gonzales, not necessarily The Californian. Email him at agonzales@bakersfield. com.
