Yeah, but it has a downside. You can be recorded so you have to act as if what you are saying is going to be publicly available in the Internet forever.
You can be recorded anytime anywhere and placed on the internet.
Within your rights, sure. Giving access to a webcam and microphone is different from being being recorded in a public setting.
It's a little better because you know it's happening and have time to prepare.
He said nothing can REPLACE it (as in doesn't provide the same experience), not that he is refusing to use anything BUT it
But that is true in the trivial(uninteresting) sense. Of course not a single city in the world can replace Paris if the experience you want to provide is visiting Paris(except for some Chinese and Las Vegas copycats, heh), but that is not the point.The point here is that if your objective is to communicate and discuss things, watching the other person is not needed as demonstrated by the existence of this site (and the radio, and the phone, and IM , and the Internet, and.. and... and). You may argue that you lose things in the process and maybe you are correct, but that is highly debatable. I, for one, think that for the strict sense of discussing ideas, text is a far better medium for different reasons: it gives time to think and formulate better arguments, it helps to avoid miscommunication due to misheard words and it provides a quite environment so it helps to reflect on the content better. Another important thing given human nature is that text communication helps to avoid the trap of prejudging a person argument based on their race/sex/age/etc. At the end, of course, is a matter of personal preference and probably due to the eternal division between introverts and extroverts.
Point the camera at inanimate object, or back at the screen!
Well, video certainly hasn't replaced it. Maybe one day we will all have devices with the multiple cameras and the signal processing to allow actual eye contact over a video call.
Na I don't think any tech can replace face to face interaction.
The same way no face to face interaction can replace the ability to write messages to people on the other side of the planet. Inability of substitution does not make something superior or inferior.