FC: Wired's Xeni Jardin on "Phonecam Nation"

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

also see:
http://www.mobileasses.com/

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http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.07/start.html?pg=2

   Issue 11.07 - July 2003

   Phonecam Nation

   Everyone's posting instant photos on the Web. Get ready for your
   close-up.

   By Xeni Jardin

   Whipping out a cheap phonecam at the height of a late-night bash, a
   Michigan frat boy snaps his own Girls Gone Wild shots and instantly
   uploads them to an online gallery accessible by anyone in the world.
   At a Los Angeles convenience store, a woman witnesses a holdup - and
   with the press of a button, she captures the thief's image and zaps it
   to 911. In Hong Kong, a mobile phone user photographs the apartment
   complex of a neighbor suspected of carrying SARS. He posts the
   pictures, details, and GPS coordinates to an unofficial database
   designed to do what the government won't: collect and provide data
   about the spread of the virus.

   The trend started innocuously a few years ago, when novelty cameras
   that plugged into mobile handsets were marketed to gadget-obsessed
   kids in Japan and Europe. But in the past few months, a global
   phonecam revolution has begun to emerge. Take the device's
   portability, add its ability to post images online, multiply by its
   growing ubiquity, and what do you get? A cheap, fast strain of DIY
   publishing in which everyone is an embedded reporter. The rise of the
   technology resembles the leap from late-'90s personal homepages to
   today's weblogs: Like blogs, phonecams are a fresh combination of
   familiar elements that equal way more than the sum of their parts.

   As phonecams proliferate - more than 13 million were sold in Japan in
   2002, and US buyers will snap up 2 million this year - you'll never
   know when someone out there might snap your photo, then upload it for
   the world to see. The cams will instantly capture and disseminate
   scenes of crimes in progress or police brutality as it happens (think
   Rodney King or Lizzie Grubman slamming into her four-wheeled prey).
   Like TV's addictive, blurry-jerky live videophone footage from Mideast
   war zones, device portability makes up for image quality. As the
   mobile imaging hordes colonize the globe, they'll capture and send
   news of natural disasters or political upheavals before conventional
   media can react. (London war protesters did just that last winter,
   uploading images to a site created by the BBC.) And the news and
   gossip feed will be cross-platform: Minutes after a story breaks,
   television and Web sources will gather phonecam shots from the scene
   and disseminate them to viewers. The world will be one big reality
   show.

   [...]




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