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Aug. 26th, 2020 12:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretLittle Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper
There's a lot that one could say about this charming book, but the thing that struck me was the perceptiveness with which Piper wrote about the social niceties of video calls. He has people answer a call with the look of someone who has just gotten out of bed, he has people caught behaving badly on video without thinking about who beyond the initial audience might see the recording, he shows debates about using video chat vs just voice chat, there's "I'm going to send you some data/video while we talk, but first you have to give me permission," there's all these dynamics of a society where video chat is widely available but not ubiquitous and in our Season of Zoom Calls, I found it eerie and kind of thrilling to see Piper imagining it fifty years ago.
There's a lot that one could say about this charming book, but the thing that struck me was the perceptiveness with which Piper wrote about the social niceties of video calls. He has people answer a call with the look of someone who has just gotten out of bed, he has people caught behaving badly on video without thinking about who beyond the initial audience might see the recording, he shows debates about using video chat vs just voice chat, there's "I'm going to send you some data/video while we talk, but first you have to give me permission," there's all these dynamics of a society where video chat is widely available but not ubiquitous and in our Season of Zoom Calls, I found it eerie and kind of thrilling to see Piper imagining it fifty years ago.