Skype, the pioneering platform of online intimacy, is coming to an end. Remembering its island of connection where friendships and relationships thrived in a bygone era of digital communication.
The End of an Era: Remembering Skype’s Island of Intimacy
Skype was a platform that defied categorization – it wasn’t just text, but not quite the real thing either. It tangled emotions and refracted IRL life in ways difficult to explain.
Skype is a communication software that allows users to make voice and video calls, send messages, and share files.
Launched in 2003 by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, Skype was acquired by Microsoft in 2011 for $8.5 billion.
Today, Skype has over 300 million monthly active users worldwide.
The software is available on various platforms, including Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS.
A Bygone Era of Online Intimacy
I spent entire nights on Skype in 2011, lost in conversations with friends and acquaintances. As Skype shuts down, I’m reminded of a bygone era when online intimacy was a peculiar, new realm that wasn’t yet an everyday facet of life.
My relationship with Skype’s clunky video call interface peaked in 2011 – the same year Microsoft purchased it for $8.5 billion, only to let it wither in the shadow of more polished options. By 2014, Skype was basically obsolete, as video calls shifted to more integrated apps like FaceTime.
A Platform of Intimacy
Skype was an island of intimacy – a place where I would spend hours catching up with friends and acquaintances who lived far away. It was the tether to people outside my small world – people older than me, cooler than me, going to more parties than me.
A whole night on Skype video hearing a friend recap his escapades of pledging a fraternity, clinging to the fact that he still wanted to talk to me. A nebulous romantic relationship kept alive by the semblance of intimacy and the promise of access – we could do homework together, my bedroom to his student lounge.
The Locus of Long-Distance Connection
The predominant feeling of Skype for me is yearning – for a bigger world, for renewed attention, for a bond to remain in place. For a person you could not actually be with. For some way to describe all the emotions caught up in ‘Skyping‘.
The locus of long-distance connection has long shifted elsewhere, taken root and entwined with normal life. You can now FaceTime someone, text them and check their other digital beams – their Instagram Stories, their Letterboxd logs, their Strava workouts, even their real-time location – from the same screen, in the same minute, with the same impulse.
The Ephemeral Nature of Skype
Skype straggled on as one of our most ephemeral digital artifacts; there is little for the digital hoarder in its remnants. Unlike text messages or camcorder video or iPhotos or the never-deleting Facebook timelines, there is no archive, no vast library of video to parse through.
Instead, I remember it as a fleeting repository of time and feeling – so much put in, no way to ever measure it or see it again. It wasn’t real life, but it was good enough then, the chipper sound and grainy texture and eager openness of an era. RIP.
- theguardian.com | Goodbye, Skype. I’ll never forget you
