I Can See You, Can You See Me?

Last week my sister bought a webcam, and it was about time. I own a Mac, so my computer came with a little camera, but not all of us are lucky enough to own such a fine piece of machinery and therefore have to go to the store and buy a webcam. My sister lives in Egypt. That’s very far away. I haven’t seen her in about 8 months, if you don’t count photos she has posted on Facebook. So, I have been bugging her to get a webcam. They are inexpensive and so much fun. I gave her a tour of my new apartment with my webcam and showed her my friends and neighborhood. Technology today is awesome, plain and simple. I can’t imagine the days when letters were how people communicated. You had to wait around for weeks to hear from people you loved, and if they lived across the oceans…forget about it. Although, how many people really lived abroad in those days, so maybe that doesn’t work as well as I want it to. Either way, even though my sister lives literally on the other side of the world, I can talk to her, almost face to face and hear her voice at the same time.

So this week, I praise the webcam. I love it. Its cute looking, like a mini Cyclops atop your computer, and it has these little feet so its more of a bird Cyclops that you love, just perching on your monitor.

So, a little history. The webcam fist came around at Cambridge University in 1991. It is infamously known as the Trojan Room Coffee Pot camera. The story goes like this (according to Wikipedia), “The coffee pot was located in the so-called Trojan Room within the old Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England. The webcam was created to help people working in other parts of the building avoid pointless trips to the coffee room by providing, on the user’s desktop computer, a live 128x128 grayscale picture of the state of the coffee pot.”

Do you think they ever thought that webcams would become a major tool in the business world, security and in our social lives? I bet they did, but probably not at first, or at least not to the extent it is today.

Webcams connect people when they otherwise cannot be together. I heard a story about a man stationed in Iraq who was able to watch the live birth of his daughter via webcam. Although he couldn’t be there, he could still feel present, and talk to his wife during the birth. Technology can do great things and while many people think that it is creating a gap and depersonalizing the world, I think it can also bring people together. And that’s why I love the webcam.

Beryl S.