VIDEOPHONE AND OTHER EYES

In Beyonce's latest single, "Videophone", featuring Lady Gaga, a femme fatale readily prances around in little clothing for an eager cohort's cellphone. For today's cool kids, this type of exchange is like a modern day mating ritual. Girls are like felines and boys are like hyenas and as our technologies are becoming more high-tech, one can see things normally reserved for behind closed doors in a text message. In Jamais Cascio's The Rise of the Participatory Panopticon, the future will be televised and seen from every angle of a crowd of camera phones. Basing his theory on Bentham's 18h century model for a prison in which all inmates would be watched at all times, (ex. Big Brother, Neighborhood Watch), citizens would willingly participate in constant sousveillance. Every supposed scandal would have a million little eyes glued upon it.

He goes on to say that even the mundane details of daily life will be documented in this way and so theoretically one could view an entire life on screen. He gives examples of a predictable rise such as the Sharp J-SH04 and 05, the Japanese created models of the first camera phone in the late 2000s. By 2003, camera phones outsold the regular models, meaning the consumer had a taste for logging and capturing. So voracious was their appetite, that moblogs have been created; these are sites devoted to mobile phone pictures. In The People Formerly Known as the Audience, Jay Rosen speaks on behalf of "those who were on the receiving end of a media system that ran one way". The interaction between producer and consumer is changing and spurting into micro-communities of interest, (i.e. old world Little Italy, etc.) and therefore the format for what people want and how they get it is changing as well.

For example, one does not need to own a television or a radio or buy a newspaper to hear what is going on in the news, they can rely on news websites like CNN and Reuters. Because of the rise of these alternative news sources, the old model is quickly going the way of the dinosaurs: extinct. The newspaper, unfortunately, is a slowly dying breed. To boost ratings, national TV broadcasts often focus on things besides the issues and get chastised by the critics but viewed nevertheless, which is the point anyway. Some believe that these formats may eventually be gone altogether and more and more things may become united under a digital eye, possibly even our currency will change, (i.e. non-material, non-tangible money).