I'm not sure whether this is the new digital image or the old trompe-d'oeil. But I have a hankering to put a sky ceiling in my living room. Unfortunately I have an old school plaster-and-lath house, rather than the aluminum and fluorescent grid of new build construction. Still... [Via Boing Boing]
If you take enough images with your digital camera, they can all be compared together and a unique signature can be determined. This means that even when you think that you are posting a photo anonymously to the internet, you are actually providing clues for the government to better tell who you are. The larger the sample size of images they have, the easier it is them to track down images coming from the same camera. Once they know all the images are coming from the same camera, all they then have to do is find that camera and take a picture to confirm it beyond a reasonable doubt.
If you have ever wanted to know the differences between two images, imageDiff is the answer. There are a lot of tools out there for comparing text, whether it be source code files or office documents, but until now there hasn't been a good way to compare images.
Have you ever* looked at tw images and wondered if you are noticing all the differences in them?
* needed to know which file format is preserving your images the best?
* wanted to know how much a photograph has been changed when you compress it?
* needed to show someone the difference between two images, but found it difficult to explain in email?
* wondered whether someone else is using one of your images or just one that is similar?
ImageDiff can do all of this for you, and more. Whether you are a professional game designer, digital artist, photographer, web designer or just use a lot of digital artwork, imageDiff can help you be more confident that you know exactly what you are looking at.
Not only is imageDiff a great image comparison tool, it is available as both a standalone utility and integrated into our next generation source control and configuration management system – Evolution. If working with digital images is part of your profession, see how Evolution can save you time and make managing your digital assets easier.
Best of all, you can download imageDiff now for FREE! Or download an evaluation version of Evolution and find out for yourself how digital asset management with integrated image comparison can improve the way you work.
With imageDiff you can:
* Compare two images and see exactly what has changed, down to the pixel.
* Compare images in different formats with each other, including JPG, GIF, BMP, TIF, PNG and more.
* Compare images of different sizes, imageDiff will scale and compare them automatically.
* Choose between four different visualization filters to highlight differences the way you want.
* Overlay the original image to see exactly where changes have occurred.
* Report the percent of pixel and color change, a great way to see the effects of image compression.
* Adjust the comparison tolerance to ignore, or allow for, compression noise and artifacts.
* Switch between larger thumbnail views of the images to evaluate changes for yourself.
* Save the comparison image for reference or to be able to show others the image changes.
* Use the full-featured command line to run imageDiff from a script or plug it into other programs.
* Configure imageDiff as your default comparison program and set up a passthrough program so that non-image files are passed to a traditional text differ. [From IonForge]
Millions of families once snapped Polaroid photographs and enjoyed passing around the newly minted prints on the spot, instead of waiting a week for them to be developed.
A tiny, battery-powered printer, top, from the company that was built on Edwin Land's Polaroid.
Now, Polaroid wants to conjure up those golden analog days of vast sales and instant gratification — this time with images captured by digital cameras and camera phones.
This fall, the company expects to market a hand-size printer that produces color snapshots in about 30 seconds.
Beam a photograph from a cellphone to the printer and, with a gentle purr, out comes the full-color print — completely formed and dry to the touch.
The printer, which connects wirelessly by Bluetooth to phones and by cable to cameras, will cost about $150. The images are 2 inches by 3 inches, the size of a credit card. The new printers are so lightweight that a Polaroid executive demonstrating them recently had three tucked unnoticeably into various pockets of his trim jacket, whipping them out as if he were Harpo Marx." [NY Times]
You can take off that ninja mask now. A new facial-recognition algorithm created by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is able to recognize faces with 90-95 percent accuracy, even if the eyes, nose and mouth are obscured
.
"Most algorithms use what's known as meaningful facial features to recognize people -- things like the eyes, nose and mouth," says Allen Yang, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley's College of Engineering who developed the new algorithm. "But that's incredibly limiting because you're only looking at pixels from a designated portion of the face and those pixels end up being much smaller than the whole image. Our algorithm shows that you only need to randomly select pixels from anywhere on the face. If you select enough of them, you can produce extremely high accuracy." [...] Yang's algorithm ignores all but the most compelling match from one subject -- basically, its most confident choice. [...] The new technique could pave the way for completely new models for online advertising, new ways of annotating video and still images, and new techniques for monitoring and identifying people in public places.
Yang says he's already been approached by one startup (which he wouldn't name) interested in adopting this technique for what he calls "preannotation." For instance, this technology could automatically add family members' names to each image in a massive photo library, Yang says, saving you the trouble of flipping through thousands of photos to find that one of Uncle Bill.
It's also easy to imagine search engines like Google being interested in automatically recognizing the faces of the humans portrayed in publicly available photos, adding the image data to the textual information surrounding those photos to produce yet another dimension for targeting advertisements. Looking at a party photo of Johnny Depp on a fan site? Google could display advertisements for Sweeney Todd.
This new technique is also bound to raise a series of red flags for privacy advocates, since what Yang has developed is a highly accurate way of recognizing people even with occlusion or distortion.
With more and more cities, retailers and employers deploying security cameras in public places, it's only a matter of time before face-recognition technology like Yang's gets added to these cameras. Then the question will be not just who is watching you -- but whether they know exactly who you are." [From Wired]
Strictly No Photography is a photo-sharing site for photographs taken where you are not allowed to take them. From the inside of the Kremlin to Kensington palace, from art galleries to war zones. Here you can see everything you've ever wanted to see that you're not supposed to. There are pictures that range from the ordinary to the profound. Whatever the content or the quality though we think that each one stands as a little piece of art in itself, as a little expression of personal liberty."
[Strictly No Photography via Fimoculous]
If you have a new compact camera, take a peek at its specifications to see if it offers a face-detection setting. Typically, this option is in a camera’s autofocus (AF) menu. Face detection is particularly handy for candid shots, when you’re working quickly and are therefore more vulnerable to misfocused shots. It’s also a boon for flash photography. With face detection turned on, the flash doesn’t try to illuminate the whole room, just the people within range—cutting down on the nuclear blast effect.
Using Face Detection: With face detection turned on, the camera highlights faces on the LCD screen and then sets the focus and exposure for the subject.
Using the face-detection feature is fairly simple. As you compose your shot, your camera highlights the faces on the LCD screen and then gives you the green light to shoot. If the camera isn’t finding the person in your shot, the problem may be that it can’t see enough of his or her face. Face detection is much more effective when the camera can see both eyes of the subject; its accuracy diminishes greatly with profile shots. Also keep in mind that although face detection is fast, it isn’t instantaneous. For best results, compose your scene and then press the shutter button down halfway to activate face detection—this will give the camera time to adjust its settings appropriately. Once the camera shows that it has identified the subjects in your composition, press the shutter button down the rest of the way to make a perfect exposure.
Face detection is so simple that you may be tempted to leave it on all the time. But as with any setting, it’s not right for every situation. When photographing sporting events and landscapes, for example, you’ll probably get better results by switching to one of your camera’s other focusing settings. I recommend reserving face detection for family gatherings, weddings, and other people-oriented events." [From Macworld]
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have developed a modular, high-magnification microscope attachment for cell phones. The device will enable health workers in remote, rural areas to take high-resolution images of a patient's blood cells using a cell-phone camera, and then transmit the photos to experts at medical centers.
The 
researchers hope that the innovation will help patients with blood disorders who live far from medical specialists get more accurately diagnosed and treated. "I wanted to make optical design relevant to today," says Daniel Fletcher, a professor of bioengineering at Berkeley. Fletcher's students found it relatively easy to integrate a simple arrangement of lenses with the cell-phone camera and transmit magnified images to a laptop using a Bluetooth attachment to the phone. The work prompted Fletcher to file a patent through the university and try to make a practical microscope. The researchers say that the cameras in late-model phones are capable of capturing all the details that a doctor would need to identify malaria parasites and cancer cells. [...]
The total cost of the first prototype, built from off-the-shelf components, was $75. The current version provides its own sample illumination from cheap, low-power LEDs. The device comes in two versions: with a magnification of about 5 times, for taking images of moles and rashes, and with a magnification of about 60 times, for capturing the details of blood cells and parasites. The higher-magnification model--the larger of the two--is roughly the size and shape of a roll of quarters. Both scopes attach to the phone with a modified belt clip.
"Microscopy is still considered the gold standard" for malaria diagnosis, says Katherine Herz, a medical doctor and a fellow in health policy at Stanford University. "If microscopy could be done with portable equipment ... [it] might be adopted far more widely and prove extremely useful." [From Technology Review]
The recent launch of Digg's image section has given the images on Digg a home of their own. Building on our work in Digg Labs, Stamen Design built a structure for these images to flow in and out of, providing a view of the Digg community's visual browsing interests on a moment-to-moment basis.
[More: Stamen]
A camera that can 'see' explosives, drugs and weapons hidden under clothing from 25 metres has been invented. The ThruVision system could be deployed at airports, railway stations or other public spaces.
It 
is based on so-called 'terahertz', or T-ray, technology, normally used by astronomers to study dying stars. Although it is able to see through clothes it does not reveal 'body detail' or subject people to 'harmful radiation', according to the designers. [...]
Unlike current security systems that use X-rays, the ThruVision system exploits terahertz rays, or T-rays. This electromagnetic radiation is a form of low level energy emitted by all people and objects. These are able to pass through clothing, paper, ceramics and wood but are blocked by metal and water. The system works by collecting these waves and processing them to form an image which can reveal concealed objects. [...]
'You see a silhouette of the form but you don't see surface anatomical effects.'
In addition, the system does not involve any of the 'harmful radiation associated with traditional X-ray security screening', according to the firm."
[Source: BBC News]
Technology that doctors expect will help detect precancerous cells faster and less painfully also could someday take cameras to parts of the body where no camera has gone before.
Cameras the size of pills could 'put eyes on tools' for laparoscopic surgery, snake inside a bile duct or fallopian tube, or weave their way deeper inside a person's lungs than any non-surgical device has been able to go.
Unlike a standard endoscope, which is almost a centimeter wide and can only be inserted into the esophagus after a patient is sedated, a new device invented at the University of Washington consists of seven fiber optic cables encased in a capsule about the size of a typical pain killer. [...]
The camera's 1.4-mm-thick tether allows the doctor to move the camera around and pull it back up once the five- or 10-minute test is finished. Human testing of the device is set to begin in about a month at the Seattle Veterans Administration hospital.
A larger, more expensive, but untethered pill camera was developed by an Israeli company in 2000 to test for intestinal cancer. Seibel said the disadvantages of the wireless camera are that doctors have no control over its path and it cannot be reused because it completes its voyage through the digestive system."
[Source: Wired]
Laser cameras are upping the ante on Harold Edgerton's bulett through the laying card of old:
"Capturing images of fleeting events—a horse's gallop, a bullet's impact, an electron's escape—is easy if you have the right equipment. Faster camera shutters used to be enough, but recently lasers have let physicists break the femto- and attosecond barriers, compressing the temporal resolution of images down to the time it takes light to cross a hydrogen atom."
[You'll find images at: Wired]
A favorite self-reflexive online movie:
A UK company has launched a 'wearable CCTV' jacket which uses 3G cellular to transmit video images back to a central office. The company says that its WCCTV 3G Covert Backpack is ideal for agents who need evidential quality recording of suspects on the move. The backpack houses all of Wireless CCTV's body-worn technology in a covert 
package.
The central unit of the body-worn equipment uses a robust Compact Flash card for digital, evidential quality recording of agents' video and audio footage. Using 3G mobile phone technology, images and sound can be remotely monitored by a supervisor, who can evaluate the situation in real-time and despatch assistance or advise the agent on possible courses of action.
Wireless CCTV has also integrated an optional GPS receiver which tracks and maps the exact location of agents in the field. The precise position of multiple agents, combined with their respective live video and audio feeds, allows supervisors to assess a situation in real-time and make decisions accordingly.
A Panic Alarm button allows agents to notify the supervisor that they need immediate assistance. At the end of an operation, data can easily be backed up for evidential purposes, reducing the need for paperwork."
[Source: cellular-news]
I wrote a post quite a while ago about Sam Waterson when he visited Carleton for a talk. His critter-vision cameras are still in the news today with this piece from CNN:
Cameras as tiny as half an ounce are mounted on animals or plants. There's no specific length for the feature; it lasts until the camera falls off. The result is a unique perspective applauded by armchair naturalists in which the stars of the film are also the videographers.
'If people can see things from the animal and plant perspective, they are far less likely to harm them or their habitat, so that's how I present it,' Easterson said.
Earlier in his career as a video artist, Easterson put small cameras in strange places -- also with the goal of getting a different perspective. He put them in popcorn poppers and washers and dryers to show what those domestic appliances looked like from the inside out. Seeing through sheep's eyes
But equipping a small flock of sheep with cameras in 1998 changed everything for Easterson, he said. The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, commissioned him to tape some sheep as they 'mowed the lawn' in a park. Easterson said he learned a lot about his new craft and the nature of animals.
'The first thing I realized was how intelligent and aware they are,' he said. 'The project changed everything in terms of respect.
'I was shocked to realize all the other animals in the flock could tell that this one sheep with the camera had been 'altered' in some way. She kept trying to enter, and they kept treating her as an outcast. I also learned sheep can run very fast and fences are not as sturdy as you think.'
That project was called 'A Sheep in Wolf's Clothing.'
Easterson takes small cameras designed for law enforcement and surveillance and modifies them for the animals or plants he's aiming to study. He changes them mostly by taking most of the weight off. For most smaller animals, the video usually is beamed wirelessly for recording.
Most of his work now comes from museums, nature centers and art centers eager to give the public an animal's-eye view. The artist said he's turned down requests from some broadcasters anxious to get gritty or confrontational pictures for 'reality'-type shows.
While not a scientist, Easterson works with researchers by offering details that they may have never seen.
'There really is data to see in these pictures,' he said. 'Take the armadillo. You can listen to its breathing patterns. You can watch closely the rotation of its ears as it encounters new things.'
While networks such as Animal Planet may focus on exotic international shoots, Easterson tries to include an animal native to the area where he's presenting an exhibit. In Florida, he equipped an alligator with the cameras, and in the Southwest, he chose a desert tarantula. A tumble weed's perspective
While it's easy to see the intrigue of animal behavior from an animal's perspective, it could be a stretch for some to consider a plant's view.
'It's maybe a funny idea to think that plants have perception, but I think they do,' Easterson said.
He said his most challenging plant shoot was driving along the desert in a rental car trying to keep up with a tumbling tumbleweed.
Easterson said no animals have been hurt working as videographers. And he's worked with bioethics groups and telemetry experts who are experienced in tracking animals with radio collars.
'I really would like to be on the radar screen, to improve my techniques,' he said.
In the long term, Easterson said he hopes to create a library of hundreds of animals, from the unique 'first animal' perspective." (Via CNN.)
Chris Danielsen fidgets with the cell phone, holding it over a $20 bill.
"Detecting orientation, processing U.S. currency image," the phone says in a flat monotone before Danielsen snaps a photo. A few seconds later, the phone says, "Twenty dollars."
[...] The Nokia cell phone is loaded with software that turns text on photographed documents into speech [...] it allows users to read anything that is photographed, whether it's a restaurant menu, a phone book or a fax. [...]
Ray Kurzweil, who developed the first device that could convert text into audio in the 1970s and the current NFB device, said portability is only the first step. Future versions of the device will recognize faces, identify rooms and translate text from other languages for the blind and the sighted.
The inventor plans to begin marketing the cell phone in February through K-NFB Reading Technology. The software will cost $1,595 and the cell phone is expected to cost about $500, Kurzweil said. [...] There are about 10 million blind and visually impaired people in the U.S., a number that is expected to double in the next 30 years as baby boomers age.
Kurzweil said those with vision problems are not the only ones expected to benefit from the technology. Dyslexics, for example, are expected to be among the users of the current device because of its ability to highlight each word as it's read aloud, helping them cope with their disability, which affects the ability to read. The highlighting function can also help them improve their reading skills, he said." [Source]
One day it might not be unusual to wear a contact lens that projects the phone's display directly onto the eye. [...] By incorporating metal circuitry and light-emitting diodes (LEDs) into a polymer-based lens, they have created a functional circuit that is biologically compatible with the eye. [...]
One 
of the goals was to see if it would be possible to build a heads-up display that could superimpose images onto a person's field of view, while still allowing her to see the real world. It would be a sort of augmented reality [...] Or civilians could use the electronic lens as a cell-phone display, to see who is calling and to watch videos during a commute [...]
Another possible application is to use the lens as a sensor that could monitor chemical levels in the body and notify the user if they indicate signs of disease. [...]. In addition, the lens could continually monitor changes over time, providing a more complete view of a person's health.
Admittedly, these applications are years away. [...]
One of the next steps for the team will be to increase the number of LEDs on the lens to a couple hundred, in the hope of making a viable display. Right now, the LEDs are about 300 micrometers in diameter, which obviously limits the number of them that can be put on a lens. In addition, LEDs this size tend to break in the lens-shaping process." [Technology Review]
Microsoft's SenseCam is being used to help people with various forms of dementia to remember things. It's a mostly always-on visual aid that hangs around the neck, regularly snapping images.
"Not only does SenseCam allow people to recall memories while they are looking at the images, which in itself is wonderful, but after an initial period of consolidation, it appears to lead to long-term retention of memories over many months, without the need to view the images repeatedly," says Emma Berry, a neuropsychologist who works as a consultant to Microsoft.
SenseCam is worn around the neck and automatically takes a wide-angle, low-resolution photograph every 30 seconds. It contains an accelerometer to stabilize the image and reduce blurriness, and it can be configured to take pictures in response to changes in movement, temperature, or lighting. "Because it has a wide-angle lens, you don't have to point it at anything--it just happens to capture pretty much everything that the wearer can see," says Steve Hodges, the manager of the Sensor and Devices Group at Microsoft Research, U.K.
An entire day's events can be captured digitally on a memory card and downloaded onto a PC for subsequent viewing. Using specially designed software, the Microsoft researchers can convert the pictures into a short movie that displays the images at up to 10 frames per second, allowing a day's events to be viewed in a few minutes.
SenseCam was originally developed as a memory aid for healthy people, but it is now in clinical testing for those with memory impairment, such as dementia. Narinder Kapur, head of the Neuropsychology Department at Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge, U.K., and leader of the eight-patient study, recently published an initial case report of one patient in the journal Neuropsychological Rehabilitation. Kapur and his colleagues found that Mrs. B could remember most nontrivial events after she had spent around one hour reviewing the SenseCam images with her husband every two days for a two-week period.
The device might help patients with mild forms of Alzheimer's disease, says Giovanni Frisoni, a neurologist at a clinical research institute in Brescia, Italy, who is not involved in the research. He is skeptical, however, about whether SenseCam could be used by patients with Alzheimer's disease without assistance from their caregivers. Still, "it might have a beneficial effect on soothing the patients' anxiety," he says. "All Alzheimer's patients have a deep anguish due to their perceived, although usually not confessed, inability to remember their recent past. Being able to go through the recent events may have a reassuring effect. Reassurance is what Alzheimer's patients want but, unfortunately, [is] what they are often denied."
[More at Technology Review]
No question, this report by reliable source Shelly Palmer from CES this year got my attention. If true, I'd like to make a flash-drive necklace with my 100 top movies on it:
During CES week, the HD DVD v. BluRay war was called in favor of BluRay. This may be premature or it may be right on the money – in truth, it would be great to have a single optical solution for HD storage. But, while everyone at the show was taking sides and talking trash, some people might have missed the other big story at CES – solid state memory
What will that mean to you? Well a standard DVD holds one movie and some additional material in 4.7GB and BluRay disc holds about four times as much. But, if you compress a movie to about 2GB where it still looks good, you can imagine a world where any given teenager could be walking around with over 400 full length, HD feature films, 1,200 standard definition films, 2,000 hours of television or 250,000 songs on their iPod or hanging on a keychain or lanyard. Current technology would not allow a consumer to transfer all of that data very easily (and what exactly would you be transferring it to anyway) so thinking about a world where your jump drive, or whatever it will be called, contains $5,000 worth of content, you can easily foresee a business in wearable art, jewelry or some other accoutrement keeps your data close to you and makes it hard to lose.
Remember Cartier-Bresson's decisive moment, that one punctum of time when the world came into glorious alignment, the moment when your heart's finger said yes, and clicked the shutter? Well, digital and computational photography is finding new ways to technologize the decisive moment so that you can take your pick at home.
Put another way, you can now buy a camera that welcomes your indecision about the decisive moment.
Cassio's new Exilim Pro E-F1 still camera offers full resolution photography using 60 fps ultra-high speed burst mode captures the crucial moment. Users can shoot at an ultra fast 60 frames per second. I
n burst mode, the frame rate can also be varied from between 1 and 60 frames per second while shooting. Up to 60 shots can be taken at once, so 60 shots per second for one second, or 5 shots per second for 12 seconds, are possible.
Users can record images not just at the instant they press the shutter button, but before! Continuously recording at up to 60 images per second, a maximum of 60 images can be saved in the camera’s own buffer memory even before the shutter button is depressed. Even if users press the shutter a little late, they will still be able to catch that vital moment.
Slow Motion View function lets users view and capture that critical moment in slow motion during still photography. Users can take photographs while, in the monitor, the momentary action that is before their eyes is displayed in slow motion. It is just as if they have slowed down the passing of time. Users can unhurriedly observe the motion of the subject as they press the shutter, ensuring that they never miss that crucial moment.
The EXILIM Pro EX-F1 can record high speed movie footage of motion too fast for the human eye, for ultra slow motion playback. Users can select a recording speed of 300 fps, 600 fps or 1,200 fps. There is also a Movie Button that lets users quickly start movie recording without first switching from still image mode.
The camera features Full High-Definition movie recording capability. Users can record beautiful movies at a screen size of 1920x1080 pixels, at a rate of 60 fields per second. The camera can be connected to an HD compatible television with a separately available HDMI cable to enjoy viewing movies."
As an old school photographer, I hate this, of course; still, I want this camera.
Last week, 10 U.S. theaters rolled out full-color 3-D posters with motion and photorealistic detail to promote the movie How She Move. [...] the advertisements feature one of the film's characters tearing up the dance floor in an eight-second clip that can be "played" in 3-D by walking from left to right of the poster. Despite the images' slightly transparent quality, what you see is pretty close to the real thing. [...]
Holographic imagery is becoming more common these 
days, from the fraud deterrents on credit cards to National Geographic's 3-D magazine covers. However, these images have been limited with respect to color, resolution, viewing angle and size. RabbitHoles' new technology takes the crisp, detailed 2-D images we're used to seeing on computer and TV screens and translates them into full-color, 3-D images. [...] Rather than simple static images, RabbitHoles' can take six- to eight-second movie clips from 2-D and 3-D films and print them into a poster that "moves" as the viewer walks past. [...]
To produce the imagery, RabbitHoles creates a 3-D computer model of the object that will be turned into a hologram. A virtual camera takes snapshots at different angles, and a software algorithm developed by RabbitHoles calculates how light would bounce off each angle in the scene. The result is up to 1,280 different snapshots, or frames, that not only hold color, distance and angle info, but light patterns as well.
To record the actual hologram onto a sheet of film, the data is sent to a printer that divides each frame into pixels -- a poster-size print can hold up to 700,000. The company then exposes each pixel with red, green and blue pulsed lasers.
If the hologram is destined to become framed artwork, it's mounted on Plexiglas, but it can be mounted on virtually anything. [...]
The development of the RGB pulsed laser was key to RabbitHoles' process. Previous systems used either a continuous-wave laser or a single-color pulsed laser. The former employs a low-intensity light that requires a long exposure time lasting from less than a second to a few minutes. Any vibration during filming can lead the laser and the film to slightly shift, diminishing the hologram's resolution.
In contrast, pulsed lasers flash for just 1/10,000,000 of a second, so getting a clear image is much easier. But up until now, pulsed lasers were monochromatic. RabbitHoles' newly engineered RGB pulsed laser offers the best of both worlds -- crisp images in full color." [Wired]
"Peeping Tom," the chilly 1959 movie by Michael Powell, concerns a young psychopath who uses a 16mm movie camera to film his victims while he is killing them. The close-ups of terror that cross the faces of the women as he impales them on a spike attached to his tripod are for him a source of curiosity and pleasure. [...] in its exploration of the dynamics between movie images and violence, criminality and voyeurism, the film was shockingly ahead of its time.
A casual reading of the news illustrates just how prescient "Peeping Tom" has turned out to be. There was the recent arrest in Nevada of Chester Stiles, who allegedly filmed himself raping a three-year-old girl. This sensational item overlapped with the capture in Thailand of Christopher Paul Neil, a Canadian schoolteacher accused of posting on the Internet images of himself having sex with a series of children. Neither would in all likelihood have been jailed so quickly had they not photographed themselves performing these atrocities. Both Pekka-Eric Auvinen, who shot eight people in a Finnish high school on Nov. 7, and Cho Seung Hui, murderer of 32 at Virginia Tech this April, made confessional videos for broadcast or posting online--so called massacre manifestos--designed to outlive their suicides. [...]
The guards at Abu Ghraib also participated in this trend. Their abuse and torture of Iraqis might have remained whispered rumors within the prison walls had they not taken pictures for their own amusement. The members of al Qaeda who beheaded Western journalists and aid workers are a subset as well. They staged these murders for the cameras in hopes the group's ruthlessness would be broadcast to viewers everywhere. Like the lead character in "Peeping Tom," they took pleasure in filming and watching playbacks of their own cruelty. [...]
The growth of these many new varieties of confessional video, self-programmed with either violent or sexual content, has coincided with the expanding reach of surveillance technology. Never have so many of us been so willing to have our lives overseen by cameras. Being photographed in public places--sometimes with one's tacit consent but usually without--is now so routine that hardly a day goes by when urban or suburban dwellers don't have a chance to catch sight of themselves on a video monitor.
While a minority still protest or at least openly worry about these Orwellian intrusions, most of us have internalized modes of surveillance so deeply by now that they are a source of either comfort or entertainment. "Big Brother" is a larky reality show and an international franchise. [...]
The photographic image has the power to magnify the everyday by the simplest means. To star in your own movie requires only that you press a button on the picture machine. The dirt-cheap costs of producing digital images and linking them to global networks that promise a vast audience--or that cater to a particular "community"--have no doubt contributed to these mutations in mores. The hundreds of niche audiences developed by cable television and the millions created by the Internet are responsible for a wilderness of images.
The rapist who trains a camera on his actions, the high-school friends who exchange sexually graphic cellphone images of themselves--even the egregiously off-key "American Idol" contestant--have this in common: They have decided that any risk they run of self-incrimination or public scorn is worth the thrill of seeing their own image looking back at them.
The one encouraging note may be the number of pedophiles, jihadists, hate groups and numbskull criminals willing to trap themselves in their own world-wide web by providing boastful evidence of their lawbreaking online." [WSJ Online]
