Article in Japan Media Review on how cameraphones are changing people’s definition of whether something is worth taking a picture of or not:
In comparison to the traditional camera, which gets trotted out for special excursions and events — noteworthy moments bracketed off from the mundane — camera phones capture the more fleeting and unexpected moments of surprise, beauty and adoration in the everyday. They also invite sharing that is more immediate, ad hoc and ongoing, such as a dad e-mailing a baby photo to a mom or a teenager showing a picture of her current crush to a friend in a fast food restaurant… As the mundane is elevated to a photographic object, the everyday is now the site of potential news and visual archiving. Sending camera-phone photos to major news outlets and moblogging are one end of a broad spectrum of everyday and mass photojournalism using camera phones. What counts as newsworthy, noteworthy and photo-worthy spans a broad spectrum from personally noteworthy moments that are never shared (a scene from an escalator) to intimately newsworthy moments to be shared with a spouse or lover (a new haircut, a child riding a bike).
Which certainly isn’t surprising when you think about it. Cameraphones aren’t just cameras that happen to be built-into phones. By their very nature they’re gadgets that we have with us most of our waking hours, and thus make it easier to capture much of the ephemera of day-to-day life that gets missed because most people don’t carry a camera with them.
