I figured that when 2010 finally arrived, I’d be here in Los Angeles on my videophone looking at my new editor in her formfitting silver bodysuit as she yelled at me from New York for sexually harassing her in the first sentence of the first column we worked on together. But even though we both have Skype, we haven’t used it once. In fact, even though Skype is the only one of all the cool gadgets that cartoons promised me would exist by 2010, people don’t seem nearly as excited as they should be. Only 34% of Skype calls even use video. And when Skype announced on Jan. 5 at the Consumer Electronics Show that we’ll soon have videophones on our televisions, everyone went right back to talking about which booths gave out the best key-chain lights. I’ve used Skype twice: to be a guest expert on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and to let my mother see her grandson. Both involved a lot of help from tech people and drool. Yes, I find Meredith Vieira that attractive. But I haven’t used it since. That’s because Skype breaks the century-old social contract of the phone: we pay close attention while we’re talking and zone out while you are. As soon as you begin to talk, I feel trapped and desperately scan the room for tasks I can do to justify the enormous waste of time that is your talking. I wash dishes, I file receipts, I read news sites, I make little fake suicide faces to my wife Cassandra about how much I want to hang up that cause her to yell “Joel, I need you now“ in a really unconvincing way that I’ve asked her not to do, but I still can’t stop making the suicide faces. In desperate times, when I am on my cell phone in the middle of nowhere, I will pace. The only other time I pace is when I stub a toe or burn myself. But when I start talking, I assume that you are sitting perfectly still, rapt. And while that is actually true when I’m talking, people aren’t listening to those of you who haven’t been on E! But Skype requires me to look at you while you’re talking, which is totally ridiculous. The only sci-fi show that understood this was Star Trek. Bones and Jim would use their flip phones to talk quickly about beaming or health issues. The only time they’d fire up the videophone was when a Klingon was sitting in a spaceship 20 yards away with guns pointed at them. Even then I think Sulu was checking out Go Fug Yourself. Interested in talking more about my theory, I used my landline to call Sherry Turkle, an MIT professor of the social studies of science and technology. She told me people are not only uninterested in Skype, we’re also not interested in talking on the regular phone. We want to TiVo our lives, avoiding real time by texting or e-mailing people when we feel like it. “Skype, which was the fantasy of our childhood, gets you back to sitting there and being available in that old-fashioned way. Our model of what it was to be present to each other, we thought we liked that,“ she said. “But it turns out that time shifting is our most valued product. This new technology is about control. Emotional control and time control. “ You’d be shocked by how many times two people talking on the phone about people not wanting to talk on the phone have to tell each other they’re enjoying their conversation. I’ve had phone sex where I expressed less appreciation of another person. If we miss anything about the regular phone, I think it’s the psychoanalyst’s trick it employed: you’re lying on a couch facing the wall, imagining nonjudgmental empathy from someone you can’t see. In her book Alone Together, which comes out next year, Turkle writes about a study in which she found that people really like to talk to robots. As soon as you ask people to interact with a computer with artificial intelligence, they start unloading secrets. Robots, it seems, are less likely to take over the earth than they are daytime-television hosting jobs. As far as the full-contact listening that Skype requires, 1 don’t think we want that all that often from people who aren’t already in our house. The fact is, we don’t really want to see other people that badly. That’s why it’s so difficult to make plans with them. That, plus texting times and places back and forth takes forever. Maybe all the stuff we thought we wanted in the future sucks. Flying cars would block our light, food pills would make Gordon Ramsey’s screaming even more preposterous, and those moving sidewalks just give me another reason to hate fat people at airports. Far better is to have control over our most valuable commodity: time. Sure, we complain about being busy, but that’s pretty great as long as we get to choose when we do things. The truth is, my editor will never even call me. She’ll just e-mail. Which is actually fine with me. There’s plenty of video online of women in silver bodysuits.(from Time, Jan. 18, 2010. )

Foul Shots Now and then I can still see their faces, nickering and laughing, their eyes mocking me. And it bothers me that I should remember. Time and maturity should have diminished the pain, because the incident happened more than 20 years ago. Occasionally, however, a smug smile triggers the memory, and I think, “I should have done something.“ Some act of defiance could have killed and buried the memory of the incident. Now it’s too late. In 1969, I was a senior on the Luther Burbank High School basketball team. The school is on the south side of San Antonio, in one of the city’s many barrios. After practice one day our coach announced that we were going to spend the following Saturday scrimmaging with the ball club from Winston Churchill High, located in the city’s rich, white north side. After the basketball game, we were to select someone from the opposing team and “buddy up“ — talk with him, have lunch with him and generally spend the day attempting friendship. By telling us that this experience would go both teams some good, I suspect our well-intentioned coach was thinking about the possible benefits of integration and of learning to appreciate the differences of other people. By integrating us with this more prosperous group, I think he was also trying to inspire us. But my teammates and I smiled sardonically at one another, and our sneakers squeaked as we nervously rubbed them against the waxed hardwood floor of our gym. The prospect of a full day of unfavorable comparisons drew from us a collective groan. As “barrio boys“ , we were already acutely aware of the differences between us and them. Churchill meant “white“ to us: It meant shiny new cars, two-story homes with fireplaces, pedigree dogs and manicured hedges. In other words, everything that we did not have. Worse, traveling north meant putting up a front, to ourselves as well as to the Churchill team. We felt we had to pretend that we were cavalier about it all, tough guys who didn’t care about “nothing“. It’s clear now that we entered the contest with negative images of ourselves. From childhood, we must have suspected something was inherently wrong with us. The evidence wrapped itself around our collective psyche like a noose. In elementary school, we were not allowed to speak Spanish. The bladed edge of a wooden ruler once came crashing down on my knuckles for violating this dictum. By high school, however, policies had changed, and we could speak Spanish without fear of physical reprisal. Still, speaking our language before whites brought on spasms of shame — for the supposed inferiority of our language and culture —and guilt at feeling shame. That mixture of emotions fueled our burning sense of inferiority. After all, our mothers in no way resembled the glamorized models of American TV mothers — Donna Reed baking cookies in high heels. My mother’s hands were rough and chafed, her wardrobe drab and worn. And my father was preoccupied with making ends meet. His silence starkly contrasted with the glib counsel Jim Anderson offered in “Father Knows Best“. And where the Beaver worried about trying to understand some difficult homework assignment, for me it was an altogether different horror, when I was told by my elementary school principal that I did not have the ability to learn. After 1 failed to pass the first grade, my report card read that I had a “ learning disability“. What shame and disillusion it brought my parents! To have carried their dream of a better life from Mexico to America, only to have their hopes quashed by having their only son branded inadequate. And so somewhere during my schooling I assumed that saying I had a “retarded“. School administrators didn’t care that I could not speak English. As teenagers, of course, my Mexican-American friends and I did not consciously understand why we felt inferior. But we might have understood if we had fathomed our desperate need to trounce Churchill. We viewed the prospect of beating a white, north-side squad as a particularly fine coup. The match was clearly racial, our need to succeed born of a defiance against prejudice. I see now that we sued the basketball court to prove our “blood“. And who better to confirm us, if not those whom we considered better? In retrospect, I realize the only thing confirmed that day was that we saw ourselves as negatively as they did. After we won the morning scrimmage, both teams were led from the gym into an empty room where everyone sat on a shiny linoleum floor. We were supposed to mingle — rub the colors together. But the teams sat separately, our backs against concrete walls. We faced one another like enemies, the empty floor between us a no man’s land. As the coaches walked away, one reminded us to share lunch. God! The mere thought of offering them a taco from our brown bags when they had refrigerated deli lunches horrified us. Then one of their players tossed a bag of Fritos at us. It slid across the slippery floor and stopped in the center of the room. With heart beating anxiously, we Chicanos stared at the bag as the boy said with a sneer, “Y’all probably like em“ — the “Frito Bandito“ commercial being popular then. And we could see them, smiling at each other, giggling, jabbing their elbows into one another’s ribs at the joke. The bag seemed to grow before our eyes like a monstrous symbol of inferiority. We won the afternoon basketball game as well. But winning had accomplished nothing. Though we had wanted to, we couldn’t change their perception of us. It seems, in fact, that defeating them made them meaner. Looking back, I feel these young men needed to put us “ in our place“ , to reaffirm the power they felt we had threatened. I think, moreover, that they felt justified, not only because of their inherent sense of superiority, but because our failure to respond to their insult underscored our worthlessness in their eyes. Two decades later, the memory of their gloating lives on in me. When a white person is discourteous, I find myself wondering what I should do, and afterward, if I’ve done the right thing. Sometimes I argue when a daft comment would suffice. Then I reprimand myself, for I am no longer a boy. But my impulse to argue bears witness to my ghosts. For, invariably, whenever I feel insulted I’m reminded of that day at Churchill High. And whenever the past encroaches upon the present, I see myself rising boldly, stepping proudly across the years and crushing, underfoot, a silly bag of Fritos.

According to the passage, which of the following statements is true?

In the author’s point of view, the traditional social contact of the phone has the following advantages EXCEPT that______.

It can be safely inferred from the passage that TiVo has the function of______.

All of the following are Sherry Turkle’s ideas on Skype and phone EXCEPT______

What is the ROOT reason for the cold shoulder Skype has received?

From the passage, we can infer that______.

The style of the passage can be best described as______.

Which of the following titles suits the passage best?