At the end of the day, Prop 8’s passage was more a generational matter than a racial one. If nobody over the age of 65 had voted, Prop 8 would have failed by a point or two.

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The good news for supporters of marriage equity is that — and there’s no polite way to put this — the older voters aren’t going to be around for all that much longer, and they’ll gradually be cycled out and replaced by younger voters who grew up in a more tolerant era. Everyone knew going in that Prop 8 was going to be a photo finish — California might be just progressive enough and 2008 might be just soon enough for the voters to affirm marriage equity. Or, it might fall just short, which is what happened. But two or four or six or eight years from now, it will get across the finish line.

From FiveThirtyEight.com

Assuming people are about as thrilled with that prospect as I am, that relegates the use of video calling to the home and office.  Here it seems slightly more useful, and as screen size and quality increase, I imagine this would become its most likely adoption vector.  But I can’t help shake the image of grandma and grandpa gathered around a docked phone, screaming and waving and peering and asking “Can you see us?” repeatedly with earnest.  And while we’re sitting down at home, why not just whip open the laptop?  Given the suddenness with which webcams have saturated the portable computer market, it seems the only hope for video calling lies in the much anticipated “convergence” of the phone and computer.  Moore’s Law may help bring that about sooner rather than later, but I think it may be a while before people throw away their 15-inch screens entirely.

If you ask me, the only hope for video calling outside of the laptop rests with some unforeseen breakthrough in technology.  When our phones can generate accurate 3D models of us by tapping into our brains and detecting the positions of our muscles, and when the corresponding models of the other parties on the line can be injected directly into our visual cortex, then, just maybe, will video calling really take hold.