Today’s Washington Post has an article on how the rise in digital photo technology has turned ordinary citizens into on-the-spot photojournalists:
GLASGOW, Scotland — At 2:42 p.m. on Oct. 11, Dean Collins heard a thunderous explosion as he worked at his computer in his 30th-floor apartment in Manhattan.
Collins looked out his window and saw a small plane crashing into a building right in front of him — the accident that killed New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle and his flight instructor. Instinctively, he recalled, he pulled his Fuji digital camera from a drawer and started shooting, thinking to himself, “This is going to be on the news.”
Collins, a consultant for a software company, said he remembered reading about Scoopt, a year-old agency in Scotland that brokers photos for “citizen journalists.” Within minutes, he had e-mailed his digital shots to Scoopt. Hours later, his picture of a smoking Manhattan high-rise was in three British newspapers, including a front-page splash in the Times of London. He earned $650 for his work.
The rapid rise of digital technology, which enables ordinary people almost anywhere to record images and post them quickly on the Internet, is changing the way the world witnesses history, not to mention the dependable misbehavior of celebrities. Events that once were recorded only by human memory may now endure in full, pixelated detail, available in seconds around the globe.
The trend is driven by the proliferation of camera-equipped cellphones, introduced in Japan in 2000. Worldwide sales topped 460 million this year and will reach 1 billion by 2010, according to industry analysts.
This technology is also changing the relationship between citizens and the state:
Governments have always controlled information, from the Nazis to South American dictators hiding evidence of their “disappeared” enemies, said David Friend, an editor at Vanity Fair. “But now the photograph has suddenly changed the equation — the power is in the hands of the average citizen,” said Friend, whose 2006 book, “Watching the World Change,” explores the rising power of images. “Whatever you do now, you will be held accountable. You will be seen.”
(…)
“We now have as close to an objective truth about an event as we’ve ever had in history,” he said.
Let 1,000 camera phones bloom.
