Pray for London

I just checked out a CNN “article”:http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/07/08/london.phones.ap/index.html about people using cell phones to capture pics and video clips of the bombings in London as they happened.

Setting aside the obvious question (Who in the world is taking pictures with their cell phones when they’re escaping from a bombing site), it really made me think about the pervasiveness of imaging technology in our daily lives. While I was in Japan, it was extremely common for people to have cameras in their cell phones — much earlier than in the States. In fact, most people avoided conversation on the street or in trains by staring into their cellphones all day PERIOD, doing heaven-knows-what. Surfing the internet, text messaging their friends, or playing games were my guesses.

We also had a bit of a problem at the high school I taught at, where a few boys got into trouble taking up-the-skirt pictures of their female classmates. Apparently they were being paid by a couple unsavory adults. And yesterday, when I visited the Rec Center at my university — lifting weights for the first time *in my life* — I read a few signs in the locker room that read, “For privacy reasons, cell phone use is prohibited in the locker room.”

Yikes. First the annoying folks who walk around all day with a phone glued to their ear, talking about nothing, as if they are somehow above interacting with the people that are physically around them. Now, will any corner of the globe go unphotographed? Are we in for a wave of amateur movie-makers, shooting speckled, choppy mini-dramas in their workplace? If the webcam stuff making rounds on the Net is any indication, *anyone* could be a star for the day — just like this “guy”:http://www.screamingpickle.com/members/StarWarsKid/ . Come, join Ghyslain among the ranks of the Internet Phenomenons!

Is “phenomenons” even a word?

But first, do say a prayer for all the folks and their families who have suffered such terrible attacks in London. I just hope they doesn’t cause the country to overcompensate and go into Extreme Lockdown and Paranoia Mode like ours.