Camera phones: Helpful or hurtful? (continued)

Camera mobile phone, the constant company, was also claimed as an anti-crime device. There were several moments Rodney King, with bystanders pulling out their cameras to record police activity Sketchy. A woman got hit by a flags from a New York subway, a photo which ended up on the cover of the New York Post the next day. There is also a mini-boom in sites to catch people who park like idiots, status too long, and mistreat your children. Think of it as a positive part of living in 1984.

More difficult question, who lurks outside the media glare, is how the camera cell phone is to change our private lives. The perceptive book Kodak and the Lens of nostalgia, Nancy Martha West writes how Kodak, with the introduction of the personal camera, taught Americans to conceive, both of their lives in terms of events remembered with love and to edit the unpleasant memories. In Victorian America, for example, arranging to take a photo of a dead relative was not uncommon part of the process of mourning. Under the reign of Kodak and advertising have become family history of happiness. Now that digital cameras have taken over, an old photo album is to give personal Flickr page, bringing with it a different set of assumptions of what this (photos a whole lot more, for beginners), and to - share it with.

Ubiquity of camera cell phone means that every moment in our lives is photographable. A consequence of this is a changed perception of the seriousness of our day to day routines. We are now more aware of ourselves as observers of "history". When a van catches fire in front of our house, we and our neighbors are now on the field recording. We e-mail that our friends, who testify to the enormity of the event, and then we all await the next sensation. This can be a positive momentum, but also fuels the increasingly destructive habit American oversharing. Snapshot speaks with one voice than I am alive and I saw that. Mobile phone camera or video image is a shout from the roof: Check this crazy that happened to me.

Photo sharing was also more aggressive in our statements that we feel unsafe, such as the presence of celebrities. Susan Sontag described the nature, essentially hostile to take pictures as a form of "soft" crime. At the age of mobile phones, the sensitivity of scalp-hunting is to achieve full of flowers. Suppose you are in Asbury Park and see Bruce Springsteen with his kids. Old impulse would be to ask Boss if you could take your picture with him. New impetus is a snap shot with a cell phone camera and sell it to a site like Scoopt. No wonder famous people do not want to stay with us.

So before taking the next racist comedian or cocaine-snorting supermodel, to put the video on Saddam in context. It is a strange echo of the Zapruder film, another piece of material that caught amateur death of a leader. Stark Differences are, of course. Kennedy Zapruder caught while standing in an open, sunlight-Dallas. Official videoed Saddam did so surreptitiously pointing the camera to the ground sometimes. But they both testify to the power of first-person witness, and how a digital copy of witnesses who can upend neat narratives and certainties. We see the best of things, we see the worst of things, we see everything.