See Spot run after mail carrier. See Spot run after mail carrier through the screen on a camera phone that is now in video capture mode. (Do not attempt to help the mail carrier. When the game is camera phone gawking, your objective is to be the insect on the wall, the god in the clouds, Uatu, the Watcher; do not intervene. You have a lens and a "record" button. Shoot things. That's all.) Name the video "Spot Attacks Mailman" and save it. Post "Spot Attacks Mailman" on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube so that everyone who follows you and everyone who follows them can see Spot run after mail carrier. Viral, perhaps. This is your eye tethered to a network of interfaces; your gawking eyes mediated by circuits and pixels and signals; your gaze injected into a digital cat's cradle frequented by gawkers intent on finding something at which to gawk. The network, the phone--once you've used them to gawk, they're extensions of your optical organs, like glasses or contacts. Maybe it's an expected evolution of the eye that network-ready camera phones are accessorized to them these days. In a sense, we were all blind before we could see what other people were seeing, before everyone's phone had a built-in camera and before social media made easy the uploading of what's seen. Now, there's my "Spot Attacks Mailman" beside a host of "Spot Attacks Mailman" in a Web image or video search.
The camera phone, as William J. Mitchell indicates in "Networked Eyes," matches well with our instinctive gawking behavior by inducing "some particularly subtle and ambiguous body language," similar to the body language that we use when we're gawking without our prosthetic eyes (Sensorium, 177). We want to cast our gaze, but we don't necessarily want to be gazed at while we're looking. (Voyeurism, maybe or not so much, given the perverted connotations of that activity.) The camera phone allows us a vantage point that a camera does not. Camera phones are everywhere, so it's harmless when a person raises one up in the middle of an event that might attract gawkers, as that person could be "dialing a number, sending a text message or surfing the Web" (177). People aren't as apprehensive of a camera phone because "Hey! I have one, too! What operating system does yours have?" A camera and a camcorder, however, are totally different monsters that are often met with "What the f#@% are you takin' pictures of?!? Get that f#@%in' camera outta my face!!!" They label a gawker as a gawker, and nobody likes to be stared at.
The camera phone allows ongoings to go on as they normally would if nobody was looking under the aid of a prosthetic eye. The prosthetic eye that is recognized as a bad omen, camera or camcorder, changes reality a bit. People ready themselves in front of a camera or a camcorder; the camera is like a police officer in uniform patrolling a neighborhood. When the officer is in sight, behaviors change. Move on. There's nothing to see here. The camera phone, though, is the officer in street clothes and not looking like a cop. Things stay the same and now comes the time to observe and report. Same thing with reality shows on TV. I'm not saying that reality shows are worthless (In saying that, did I indicate that I think they're worthless?), but they would possibly be worth a lot more if there were no writers and no massive production crews in front of whose lenses the cast members can become hams. Maybe the footage should be recorded by camera phones or hidden cameras, so there's no extravagant transformation of a Real Housewife into an artificial housewife with an unbearable flamboyant divatude. Less entertaining? (Less entertaining anyway...)
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