For me it's the slurring compression artifacts as much as the lag that makes cell phone conversations, web meetings, etc. inferior. Local digital cell phone calls mimic the old cross-country long distance analog calls of yesterday in terms of delay.

w.r.t broadcast video, the eye/mind can still pick out an image from a static-filled snowy image, but digital artifacts from low/poor signal result in freeze-frames and garbled mess.

Summary: Digital. When it's good, it's very good. But when it's bad, it's awful.

This is it exactly. Calls though the landline failed rather more gracefully.

Agreed, heck, I still lament low latency dial-up shell access. Even at 9600 baud it was still more responsive and felt like using a computer in the same room. Chatting with somebody like that, in talk/ytalk/etc, where you could see their every keystroke was a totally different experience because you could even get a vague sense of their thinking process through their pauses and edits.

I was using a 9600 baud connection about an hour ago. It sucks rocks. You can see the ascii-menu updating. Everything flickers. (Serial console access to a server, if you really care.)

If you run ytalk on a modern machine, it doesn't flicker, but you can still get every keystroke, because that's the protocol.

I have a server with ntalk for a few friends and it is my favorite method of non face-to-face communication.