Wired Magazine: Phonecam Nation

By Xeni Jardin at 11:38 am Tuesday, Jun 10

I wrote an essay for this month's issue of Wired Magazine about camera-phones and cultural change. Snip:

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.

Here's a link to the online version, but I encourage you to step away from the laptop and go buy a hard copy. Paul Boutin's historic Slammer story, in the same issue, is nothing short of stunning in print. Discuss