Everyone's posting instant photos on the Web. Get ready for your close-up.
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.
It's already happening. Weblogs are giving way to photoblogs, and these are morphing into phoneblogs. From LA to Paris to Tokyo, glimpses from the mundane (just how bad was midtown traffic?) to the sublime (just how red was the sun when it sank into the Pacific?) are captured and published by newly minted, accidental phone-media diarists. They may not consider themselves writers or photographers, but they're using the gadgets to broadcast the days of our lives, everywhere they go, through improvised frame-by-frame storyboards.
And don't forget sex, always a spur to innovation. "Upskirt" phonecam voyeurism in Japan is already a growing challenge for law enforcement. The device's low profile makes snapshot-sneaking easier and detection harder. (The devices are already banned in some Hong Kong changing rooms.) Portals like Cam7.com or uboot.com's SMS network - which allows users to view webcam images on their smartphones or share phone-captured pics and video - seem destined for pornographic deployment. And fans of photo showcases like PhoneBin are already competing in hot-or-not picture wars. Inevitably, the image with the most skin wins.
Of course, we're still in the early days of this revolution. Phonecams won't fulfill their potential until they can send big photos fast, anytime, anywhere, to anyone. American mobile networks remain pitifully unreliable compared with those in Asia and Europe. Getting giddy over phonecam photos and video seems hasty when US carriers can't even deliver voice service that works everywhere all the time.
Eventually, though, network upgrades will bridge the bandwidth gap - and the introduction of megapixel phonecams from Sony Ericsson, Mitsubishi, Sharp, Fujitsu, and others suggests that device makers will be ready with better hardware. With video in the mix, things get really interesting. AT&T network subscribers can now choose Nokia's 3650 model with video capture and Bluetooth so they can shoot phonecam movies to nearby PCs and PDAs. Sony Ericsson's clamshell Z1010 phone, coming later this year, is equipped with two cameras and displays for apps like videoconferencing.
The pieces have been around for a while, but as time and technology advance, the cloud of bits and bytes begins to converge. Is it public? Is it personal? Is it media? Is it conversation? We're about to find out.
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