Dumb camera tricks

Note: Weekend op-ed, Smile! You’re on YouTube

“You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.” Scott McNealy, CEO Sun Microsystems, 1999

Last week two Winnipeg high school teachers were suspended pending a decision on whether they’ll be fired or not.

Apparently the teachers, male and female, decided to liven up a spirit rally in the gym by performing a lap dance. It was said to be… not in the best of taste. But you don’t have to take my word for it, a student caught it on cellphone camera and posted it on YouTube.

My money’s on fired.

Northern Territories, Australia: A closed circuit TV camera allegedly, “shows a woman throwing her 10-month-old baby on the ground after her partner left on a bus without her.”

In the newspaper business we have to say “allegedly” to keep from being sued. But you can see that on the Internet too.

Last November, Miss California and Miss USA runner-up, Carrie Prejean, settled a lawsuit against the Miss USA pageant out of court, after some racy videos she’d made surfaced. Not as racy as videos Paris Hilton, Pamela Anderson, and Rob Lowe made, but racy enough, though they’ve been kept off the Internet – so far.

By the way, I think those teachers should be fired. Not just because they were acting in a vulgar and indecent manner in front of kids as young as 13, but because they were so unbelievably stupid it’s difficult to imagine they’ve anything worthwhile to teach.

I mean, come on, they didn’t know that was going to happen?

Everybody has cell phones these days, most with cameras.

There are video cameras in buses, streets, shops, and pockets. Because of my job, I am never without a digital camera that takes both stills and video.

And yet people still insist on doing dumb things in front of cameras they really ought to know are going to come back to haunt them. If they’re funny, they easily go viral on YouTube.
High school kids have even coined a word for taking and sending intimate pics of themselves with cell phone cameras, “sexting.”

(“Oh but my boyfriend would never pass these around to all his friends, because he loves me and we’ll be together forever.”)

There are actually a lot of pluses to living in the video/Internet age.

A lot of crime is caught on camera these days, making arrests and convictions more likely. Dashboard cameras record what really goes down during traffic stops and makes police mindful of their own professionalism as well. Politicians can’t get away with flip-flopping quite so much when anything they’ve ever said in front of a camera is accessible from any computer. The organization Witness.org distributes video cameras around the world to document human rights abuses.

But we also have to live with the possibility any embarrassing or shameful thing we do or say could be recorded, and that recording could be around forever.

And you think it’s bad now, wait until you can go to Radio Shack and buy a video camera mounted on a radio-controlled scale-model ant, housefly, or cockroach. (“Learn about nature firsthand through telepresence! But of course you must agree not to spy you your neighbors with this educational toy.”)

When?

I’d guess ten years tops.

It used to be religion exercised a certain amount of social control by teaching God watches and judges you. I liked it better when it was only God. He’s more forgiving and doesn’t post on YouTube.