The real non-story in the article is describing the downright awful behaviour of advertisers and marketers, and trying to say the problem is cameras.
> "By 1905, less than 20 years after the first Kodak camera debuted, Eastman’s company had sold 1.2 million devices"
Smartphones today sell that many roughly every 9 hours[1]. Add laptops, tablets, quadcopter drones, dashcams, doorbells, CCTV cameras, compact cameras, DSLRs, cars with builtin cameras. I think we're still at the early days of cameras changing the world. "The future is here but it's not evenly distributed yet"; twenty years ago, Flickr and YouTube were founded. There's almost nothing you can't see online or on TV now: any activity, any place, any thing, especially including the minutiae of other people's lives and inside their homes from the luxurious to the impoverished, ostentatious or humble, everyday or holiday, there's countless photos and videos of it.
Want to see a driver's view of a tram or truck or bus journey in a foreign city? A trip on a luxury train or a remote mountain top? A helicopter flight, a submarine trip, Australian outback or Thai food stalls? People sitting on their couch watching TV and chatting about it, someone angrily ranting from their kitchen, people cooking food and eating it, people at work or relaxing, the insides of factories offices public places or government buildings, rare equipment and devices, museums, you-seeums, no-seeums up close; do you want voyeurism, inspiration, exploration, drama, tranquility, nature, disaster, ingenuity, warzone or poorzone, languages, opinions, the mundane, or the joys of propane?
You can find it, you can see it - you can drown in endlessly scrolling it, it can be tuned to your interests or sought on a whim - but you can't have it through a screen.
it will take more than 20 years for the effects on society to fully happen.
> "By 1905, less than 20 years after the first Kodak camera debuted, Eastman’s company had sold 1.2 million devices"
Smartphones today sell that many roughly every 9 hours[1]. Add laptops, tablets, quadcopter drones, dashcams, doorbells, CCTV cameras, compact cameras, DSLRs, cars with builtin cameras. I think we're still at the early days of cameras changing the world. "The future is here but it's not evenly distributed yet"; twenty years ago, Flickr and YouTube were founded. There's almost nothing you can't see online or on TV now: any activity, any place, any thing, especially including the minutiae of other people's lives and inside their homes from the luxurious to the impoverished, ostentatious or humble, everyday or holiday, there's countless photos and videos of it.
Want to see a driver's view of a tram or truck or bus journey in a foreign city? A trip on a luxury train or a remote mountain top? A helicopter flight, a submarine trip, Australian outback or Thai food stalls? People sitting on their couch watching TV and chatting about it, someone angrily ranting from their kitchen, people cooking food and eating it, people at work or relaxing, the insides of factories offices public places or government buildings, rare equipment and devices, museums, you-seeums, no-seeums up close; do you want voyeurism, inspiration, exploration, drama, tranquility, nature, disaster, ingenuity, warzone or poorzone, languages, opinions, the mundane, or the joys of propane?
You can find it, you can see it - you can drown in endlessly scrolling it, it can be tuned to your interests or sought on a whim - but you can't have it through a screen.
it will take more than 20 years for the effects on society to fully happen.
[1] Roughly 1.2Bn/year, ~100M/month, https://www.statista.com/statistics/263437/global-smartphone...