Somebody's Watching Me: Cameraphones

Last week Igor and I had the pleasure of presenting some of our work on Mobile Monday SFU to a group of local high-school teachers. We began our discussion on how mobile devices could support education through interactive applications in the classroom. However, the topic quickly shifted as the teachers began relating personal experiences with the invasion of classrooms by cellphones. Particularly, most were alarmed by proliferation of cameraphones in schools. Teachers, facing down perhaps the most eager adopters of cameraphone are in a unique position to observe innovative uses of this disruptive new technology.

It's said Philippe Kahn constructed the first cameraphone in 1997 to share media of his daughter's birth. Though the able to record media and upload it to the web had already existed for years, Kahn's first pictures signalled the beginning of a revolution. The innovation of the cameraphone lay in its ability to utilize the network infrastructure already used by mobile phones to instantly share media across the web.

Confronted with an unfamiliar technology that is now standard in cellphones, teachers have a right to be anxious. While cheating in school certainly doesn't require advanced technology, the cameraphone certainly makes cheating easy. Concealed in a pocket or sleeve, a cameraphone can quickly appear to photograph a test or answer key before returning to its secret location unnoticed. Where the real trick comes in is the fact that pictures can then before forwarded to someone else before being deleted to remove any incriminating evidence from the suspect phone. Of course the buck doesn't stop at cheating. The teachers also related incidents of everything from after school fights to baiting of students and other teachers all being recorded and subsequently uploaded to the web via cameraphones. These weren't even incidents they had heard of in the news, they were incidents in the schools they actually worked in.

Canadian students are quick learners, and so are students from all over the world. The first pictures that emerged of the London Tube Bombings were those taken with cameraphones by eyewitnesses on the scene. From that inciting incident cameraphones videos have steadily been making their way to headline reports so regularly that news organizations now actively encourage viewers to send in their pictures and video. And while this has always existed to some extent with amateur video, cameraphones facilitate the sharing process by making it as simple as pressing a button. Websites like Scoopt encourage 'Citizen Journalists' to sell their pictures to the press by acting as a middleman between eyewitnesses armed with cameraphones and news organizations.

So are we living in some kind of reverse 1984 where we don't have to worry so much about "Big Brother" but our next door neighbour? Cameraphone vigilante websites exist. One of my personal favourites, I Saw Your Nanny, invites readers to take pictures of misbehaving nannies. Whether the website offers anything more than an interesting look into the dark realm of child care is questionable. But one thing is for sure, no matter who you are, you are being watched.

For the moment the best solution to this invasive technology seems non-technical. I think a equal portion dose of common sense and evolved etiquette will cure the worst aliments of cameraphones. With the aid of blogs, youTube and the greater Internet, cameraphones in the right hands become not only a tool of the concerned citizen journalist but also means of democratizing media through the freedom of sharing information.

-jb