Wallrus Magazine: “It is an interesting question — what one tries to do, in writing a letter — partly of course to give back a reflection of the other person.” So wrote tireless correspondent Virginia Woolf to her friend Gerald Brenan, on October 4, 1929. Now all it takes to capture an accurate reflection of someone far away is a Skype account. This raises another interesting question — what are we trying to do when we Skype?

Skype is the most popular and sexiest form of VoIP, or Voice over Internet Protocol — a technology that allows any computer with a broadband Internet connection to act as a telephone. Skype was created in 2003 by the same Danish and Swedish entrepreneurs and Estonian software developers who created Kazaa (a file-sharing program similar to Napster). Since then, Skype has taken the communications world by storm: as of April 2008, it had more than 309 million registered accounts.”