Asimov had a story based on a sparsly populated planet where people 'mostly' communicated by some sort of Visiphone like the current tele-conferencing networks.

(The detective story...cant name it right now)...

And, for those who have not read it...find the short story "Dodkin's Job" (written in 1959, by Jack Vance) to answer the question "Why IS everything so screwed up?"

...(it has even been turned into a song by Dave Diamond, which is in the database...but I was only able to access it by clicking on "D" in the database and scrolling down)

for a learned article on Sci-Fi referring to Dodkin's Job, do a Google search on the title and scroll down to "The truth is in here" link and click on 'cached' version to bypass authorization page. (Google gets you LOTS of places!)