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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;-jeffB, post: 2147148, member: 27832&quot;]<b>No. It doesn&#039;t seem strange at all. Indeed, it&#039;s starting to seem strange when something happens that <i>isn&#039;t</i> captured on video. Here&#039;s why.</b></p><p><br /></p><p>For the entire twentieth century, getting photos or footage was kind of a big deal. (Prior to that, they were essentially nonexistent.) A camera, even late in the century, was something you carried along if you though you were going to be taking photos; a video camera was <i>gear</i>, something you lugged, hoping that you had enough batteries and tape to capture what you wanted.</p><p><br /></p><p>And, by the way, a &quot;phone&quot; was something that sat on your desk or hung on the wall.</p><p><br /></p><p>Now, suddenly, everyone is <i>expected</i> to carry a device that lets them record effectively unlimited photos and video footage, make calls, send messages, and access a global multimedia network. Not because it&#039;s suddenly critical to record and report everything, but because it&#039;s <i>sometimes nice</i> to do so, and it&#039;s <i>absurdly cheap</i> to build a device that can do it.</p><p><br /></p><p>I remember, a very few years ago, paying north of $500 for a standard-definition video camera. A tape capable of holding an hour of footage cost five or ten bucks. Transferring that footage to a computer took one hour per hour of footage.</p><p><br /></p><p>Now, you can get webcams with better picture quality than that video cam for under $20; shop aggressively, and you can get them for under $5. A wall-mountable IP camera is well under $100; a system with a bunch of cameras and a disk to record (say) the last 24 hours of video from all of them is under $1000.</p><p><br /></p><p>How many robberies or shoplifting incidents do you think it would take for a merchant to lose more than a thousand bucks? Under the circumstances, how does it make sense <i>not</i> to just leave cameras running everywhere, all the time?</p><p><br /></p><p>And once you have that video, you can copy it around in much less time that it took to record it. Upload it to YouTube, and you&#039;ve just <b>distributed it to the whole world, for free.</b></p><p><br /></p><p>The only &quot;conspiracy&quot; here is the insatiable drive of electronics manufacturers to sell more stuff, by making it cheaper and more useful, and the insatiable drive of people everywhere to get public attention.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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