Interest: August 2004 Archives
Again, i read another article about the fear of camera-phones. Here, a Black Eye Pea concert hosted by the RIAA for the DNC this past week was the cause of another round of Cellphone camera fear. Lawrence Lessig Blog writes about this incident at the DNC. Siting that the security guard saying it was a sponsor choice. Of course with the RIAA sponsoring, i guess they were probably scared of people recording the event and P2P-ing it all over. The blog also links to an Austin News station article on the views of Camera Phones.
About two month ago, i was the victum of such an event. The UCLA campus holds movie screening for the students, and i being here was going to take full adventage of that fact. So after picking up a ticket for the screening of Garden State The grad student looking guy with the glasses promptly warned me, "No cellphones!" I was thinking to myself, sure i know its distrubing, i can set it to vibrate you know. Apprently he was wise enough to follow up with the comment that the screening had a strict, "NO CAMERA!" rule, thus cellphone cameras. TO be safe, they warned everyone to just not bring any devices that might be, confusing, u know maybe a lens or something on a battery. The main cause of this was that the star/writer/director of Garden State, Zach Braff was also doing an appearence at the screening. Thus the tight security, cause we all wanted a piece of his b-list ness, well he might be A-list now after his rumors with Natelie Portman. Though i wanted to see this movie, but i was torned between the walk to put my phone in my car/office and back to the auditorium. In the end i decided aginst the walk and just drove home.
Clearly with these last two events, the cause of a media fear towards camera cellphones is ever growing. More events will happen, as the leading PR dude will go, hey NO CameraPhones Allowed to the security guys, and thus, drama. The security people are just following a rule, and the PR people are probably following a trend. I guess my biggest fear is that this will become a trend at events, and thus people will dismiss the cellphone camera bit before we even get to defend it. I assume there's not much to defend, a cellphone camera IS a camera, and yes u can sneak pictures with it. So how's this different then sneaking in a mini photo camera? Technically film works better under low light then digital. This brings up all the recent links to the an old article, the Camera Fiend. When Eastman Kodak introduced the first "personal" camera in 1888, people were scared that, the "Camera Fiend" would go around and take picture and violate everyone elses privacy. But i think camera have done ok in the last 120 yrs. I think this is an issue similar to guns, its really about the people shooting, not the camera. I'm quite sure there's more then one Artistic/Invaision Privacy debates thats gone on since the days.
A new Wired Article discusses the dilemma of the modern day advertisers. We, the 18-34 male demographic is, apprently messing up everything. This article shows datas about how we are either watching more Cable TV or playing video games or using the internet. All sign points to network TV advertisements as a dying art. So what are ad agency doing these days? Well the article mentions some interesting things such as viral marketing, live demos and to the large movement of Videogame advertising.
Also the article address issues in datamining for advertisement. Stuff like how TiVO tracks what u record, what u skip, and what channel u change to after a show. While Nielson uses a paper dairy.
