Why — though in the early days of interlace's internetted teleputers that operated off largely the same fiber-digital grid as the phone companies, the advent of video-telephoning (a.k.a. 'videophony') enjoyed an interval of huge consumer popularity — callers thrilled at the idea of phone-interfacing both aurally and facially (the little first-generation phone-video cameras being too crude and narrow-apertured for anything much more than facial close-ups) on first- generation teleputers that at that time were little more than high-tech tv sets, though of course they had that little 'intelligent-agent' homuncular icon that would appear at the lower-right of a broadcast/cable program and tell you the time and temperature outside or remind you to take your blood-pressure medication or alert you to a particularly compelling entertainment-option now coming up on channel like 491 or something, or of course now alerting you to an incoming video-phone call and then tap-dancing with a little iconic straw boater and cane just under a menu of possible options for response, and callers did love their little homuncular icons — but Why, within like 16 months or 5 sales quarters, the tumescent demand curve for 'videophony' suddenly collapsed like a kicked tent, so that, by the year of the depend adult undergarment, fewer than 10% of all private telephone communications utilized any video-image-fiber data-transfers or coincident products and services, the average u.s. phone-user deciding that s/he actually preferred the retrograde old low-tech bell-era voice-only telephonic interface after all, a preferential about-face that cost a good many precipitant video-telephony-related entrepreneurs their shirts, plus destabilizing two highly respected mutual funds that had ground-floored heavily in video-phone technology, andvery nearly wiping out the maryland state employees' retirement system's freddie-mac fund, a fund whose administrator's mistress's brother had been an almost manically precipitant video-phone-technology entrepreneur . . . and but so why the abrupt consumer retreat back to good old voice-only telephoning?
The answer, in a kind of trivalent nutshell, is: (1) emotional stress, (2) physical vanity, (3) a certain queer kind of self- obliterating logic in the microeconomics of consumer high-tech.