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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