The Download

Don't Say Cheese!

Or, worse, unwitting Underoos models. Consider, for instance, that this past spring, quick-thinking Council members in Bolton, a town near Manchester, England, banned the use of cameraphones in the changing areas and restrooms of community sports centers to prevent pedophiles from surreptitiously snapping shots of scantily clad kids. (That nice man over there is possibly not just calling his wife.)

Of course, the extremes of cameraphone misuse—like the extremes of any misused technology—are easy to get all exercised about. (A few months ago, a rumor was posted on the Internet that a group of men had used their cameraphones to record the rape of a woman in a bar in England; it turned out, shockingly, to be entirely true.) After all, rapists and pedophiles and other sickos who wished to quickly, clandestinely record their activities had digital cameras before, and Polaroid cameras before that. The crimes of the few will always stand out—and make for good eleven-o’clock-news stories that suggest that the technology involved is somehow responsible for the bad deeds. (I mean, please. Paris Hilton didn’t really need a camcorder to turn into an exhibitionist—she was already a walking sex tape. And I really don’t want to know what she plans to do with the Nokia cameraphone that “Page Six” took great pleasure in noting that she carries.)

So forget cameraphone-related criminality for a moment. The more interesting phenomenon is what happens when an image-capturing technology is suddenly being used by tens of millions of people, almost literally overnight. There are, for instance, already 2.7 million SprintPCS Vision customers—and in the third quarter of this year alone, they uploaded 23 million photos (i.e., they certainly shot many more photos, some of which they wisely discarded, but liked 23 million of them enough to actually e-mail them to people). That’s a lot of stuff suddenly being photographed that likely never before would have been photographed.

There’s also the question of what happens to our collective understanding of the relative privacy of public space. New Yorkers in particular still tend to think of themselves as virtually invisible—anonymous—in public. But when you really think about it, any time you step outside of your home, your image is being recorded. In a way, cameraphones merely democratize, or delegate, Big Brotherdom. Now, instead of just being shot by the cameras hidden in your ATM vestibule and bank and deli and pharmacy, you might get captured by any number of the cameraphones surrounding you.

“E-mailboxes were hardly lacking for pictures of your adorable babies and frisky puppies before the cameraphone explosion.”

Meanwhile, some unexpected forms of visual information are getting shot and sent, too. In Japan, for instance, there’s the phenomenon of teenage girls engaging in “digital shoplifting”—photographing a cute haircut or an adorable handbag featured in a women’s magazine, and then e-mailing the shot to friends instead of actually buying the magazine. It’s considered so serious a threat to newsstand revenues that the Japanese Magazine Publishers Association recently started up a public-information campaign complete with posters reminding readers to mind their “magazine manners.” (Lucky magazine, beware!)

The manners thing is key. The great threat of cameraphone ubiquity is probably not that creeps will be secretly taking pictures of your luscious breasts when you wear that great low-cut blouse but that you’ll be taking and sending pictures of things and people you probably shouldn’t be. (E-mailboxes were hardly lacking for pictures of your adorable babies and frisky puppies before the cameraphone explosion.)

Blogger Peter Rojas, who edits the Gizmodo.com gadget site, likens this to the e-mail effect. “It’s like how e-mail makes it really easy for every dipshit to blast off an angry missive just because it’s easy. You could always send an angry, anonymous letter to somebody—but how often did you do that, you know? Now you’re doing it all the time! It takes two seconds. You don’t have to get a stamp.”

Now, also, you don’t have to carry a camera—you’ve always got one. A cameraphone makes taking a picture way too easy, way too seamless. It practically begs you to be capturing everything, even ridiculous things.

Sort of like how an office copier begs you to pull down your pants and sit on it. Ass photocopying as a pastime did not exist before the advent of office copiers. The difference, of course, is that cameraphone picture-taking is virtually unnoticeable. Cameraphones discreetly bring a sort of antisocial behavior into social spaces. You don’t need to be all by yourself in the copier room, after hours, to engage in it.

The whole world is now the copier room.