E-conomy / Paul Andrews
Our everyday, everywhere exposure to video

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Digital video is starting to have profound implications for the way humans absorb information, interact and communicate.

Are we entering a post-literate society? How does the presence of screens with moving images just about everywhere affect our behavior? Is Big Brother watching us, or does it just feel that way?

These were some of my thoughts while strolling the exhibition floor at the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Never before have there been so many ways to watch — from huge, breathtakingly sharp 80-inch (that's almost 7 feet) plasma monitors to tiny cellphone screens capable of showing live TV and recording 15-second video clips.

Pop-down movie screens from car ceilings, pop-up movies from dashboards. Screens on the back of automobile headrests. Portable DVD players, personal digital assistants capable of video playback. I looked hard for a wristwatch with video, and although Microsoft's new SPOT watch doesn't offer it yet, the concept seems inevitable.

As a panelist at a recent WSA technology predictions dinner, I asked how many in the audience had watched a movie on a PC — desktop or laptop. Nearly every hand in the ballroom went up.

I doubt this would have been true a couple of years ago, when even PC stalwarts were maintaining that movies were something for the family TV sets. Have movies changed? No, but the way people think of them as a medium has.

On my flights to and from Vegas, the type of traveler who once did e-mail or spreadsheets on laptops was watching DVDs. You see the same phenomenon in airports and hotel lobbies — even on buses.

Yes, you see even more iPods and music players. But how far away can we be from an iVid: a small screen capable of downloading movies and other video off a PC or the Internet and receiving TV signals over the airways?

(Apple Computer Chief Executive Steve Jobs says the company is not interested in an iVid, or whatever you want to call it. But Jobs, who likes to surprise the marketplace, also is notorious for denying development in an effort to buffalo the competition.)

Form factor isn't the real driver in handheld video. Palm-size TVs have been available for years without catching on. But their content was limited to over-the-airways TV — three or four channels at best. Reception was always an iffy proposition; you certainly couldn't watch them on airplanes. Even with crisp reception, the nature of TV content — especially sports and fast-moving action — translated poorly to tiny screens.

Content choices galore

Digital video has changed all that. Content selection is far more diverse, especially when you add downloadable choices to the mix. Reception isn't really an issue unless you're watching live TV (even then, digital satellite promises to enhance your options). Display technology is far better, and offers options like zoom, pause and replay. (Digital audio enhances video's appeal as well.)

Digital also opens up a whole new arena of video applications hitherto unavailable to the average consumer. Easily editable (no tape to splice) home movies are an obvious starting point. Compressible and copyable, video of baby's first steps or an offspring's graduation takes the still photo a step further and can be sent via e-mail, posted on the Web or shown on a handheld to the friend or acquaintance.

Travel and adventure are other arenas. Extreme sports, training, teleconferencing, speeches, music — all point toward "videobiquity" from a variety of digital devices.

Combine Apple's new GarageBand music software with video and you've got GarageMTV, another step toward a day when bands can promote and disseminate their music without having to go through the Hollywood star mill.

Then there's the "Truman Show" effect. This was the movie, starring Jim Carrey, based on the premise of filming a person's entire life. Fanciful stuff: Whose life is really worth documenting in its entirety?

The killer app at CES

Consider, however, Deja View's Camwear, to my mind the "killer app" of CES this year. A tiny camera clips onto your glasses, hat or shirt pocket. It's attached by a thin cord (which you can run inside your shirt or top) to a camcorder that, because it uses flash storage and has no display, is about the size and weight of a deck of cards.

Here's the concept: Camwear records everything you do, but doesn't store it anywhere until you tell it to, and then only in 30-second clips (16 on an included 64 megabyte memory card, but it accepts up to a 512 MB card).

But the key is this: You get to decide after the fact if something's worth keeping — and then capture it — rather than recording everything and having to go back and view and edit hours of video.

For longer clips you can "daisy-chain" 30-second segments (although you'll miss about 1.5 seconds of action in between). Battery life is around four hours. It uses state-of-the-art MPEG-4 formatting and works with a PC, Mac, TV and related display devices.

Beyond the obvious "America's Funniest Home Videos" application, Camwear has a host of intriguing uses. Consider the ATM that doesn't give you your cash. Or the salesperson who changes the deal on you. Or playing back the earthquake or car crash to the insurance agent. It's your life as Reality TV.

Something transformational is going on here. It seems obvious that video is consuming more of our collective attention span, supplanting paper, text and sound-specific sources.

Future implications

Is this good or bad? Where is it leading? One might speculate that video will completely replace the written word — but that ignores the unique efficiencies of text as a communications form (what happens to directional traffic signs or tax returns, for instance).

It's also easy to conclude that video-only could impart a more superficial understanding of the world around us. What happens to in-depth information sources — news, reports, studies, white papers and archival information — in a video-based society?

Yet video has its own richness, of course, extending well beyond text.

Then there's our quality of life and self-concept as human beings. If the camera is always on us and our surroundings, what does that do to our sense of privacy, security and individuality?

For all the manifestations of videobiquity at CES, there were few answers. It's all so new that the gee-whiz factor of a 7-foot screen and 2-inch TV overcomes any second thoughts. And the downloadable side of video still hasn't entered the equation in a meaningful way. Even on a high-speed connection, video is a bear to transfer.

What if everyone walked around with a Camwear camera? It's intriguing to speculate on the societal impact. Not just Big Brother but little brother, mom and dad and the family dog could be watching you.

On the other hand, you'd be watching back.

Personal video by itself doesn't necessarily imply George Orwell's dark vision of the future. But it adds an element to the equation that he missed. There were certainly intimations of "1984" in the video explosion at CES.

But the combined power of digital with the Internet suggests a more complicated and diverse scenario than anyone could have foreseen — and a path whose implications we are only beginning to identify.

Paul Andrews is a freelance technology writer and co-author of "Gates." He can be reached at pandrews@seattletimes.com.

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