IT IS NOT always easy to predict the social impact of a new technology. When the latest picture-messaging phones hit the market, it was a safe bet that they would be used for distributing holiday postcards, football highlights and, naturally, pornography. But the phones are heralding a broader cultural revolution, with already some fascinating consequences.
Most attention until now has focused on the less salubrious opportunities offered by the combination of highly portable digital cameras and fast internet connections. An alleged rape in a Brighton pub this summer, said by police to have been filmed on a camera phone, was only the most prominent of many reports highlighting the potential appeal to voyeurs and paedophiles of the phones — which has led many fitness centres to ban them from changing rooms.
Last week, by contrast, a report from New Jersey showed how this technology is also being used to prevent crimes. A 15-year-old boy, allegedly grabbed in the street on Tuesday night by an older man, pulled out his phone camera and snapped the man and his car number plate. Police used the images to arrest and charge a man.
It wasn’t the first time the phones have been used in this way. Recently, an 18-year-old woman in Yokohama, Japan, used her camera phone to photograph a man who was fondling her on a train; after seeing the images, police made an arrest at the next stop. In Sweden, a shop manager used his Nokia 7650 last May to photograph a teenager who was demanding cash at knifepoint. Minutes after the manager sent the images to police, they found and arrested him. The crime-fighting scope of picture-messaging has not been lost on the phone operators: in the US, Nextel Communications is marketing a Motorola phone to police as a way to broadcast colour mugshots or missing-children photos.
The technology is also having an unforeseen impact in health care. At the Royal Glamorgan Hospital in South Wales, junior doctors use the phones to send X-ray images for investigation — which, they say, cuts waiting times.
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Other business users to benefit range from estate agents (sending property details to clients’ phones) to Hong Kong’s pimps (offering their customers previews of the delights on offer). As with text-messaging, it is you the user, rather than the phone companies, that will determine which applications take off.
As these digital eyes become ever more ubiquitous, the mainstream media, too, will find camera phones shaping more of their output. Broadcasters such as Japan’s NHK are already accepting viewers’ phone-cam news footage, and magazines are inviting readers’ snatched photos of celebrities. Could 3G’s ultimate legacy be to put an amateur paparazzo on every street corner.
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IF YOU can’t find a radio station that matches your tastes, how about one that gets to know you personally, then plays only the music it thinks you’ll enjoy? Various entertainment websites are now offering a level of personalisation previously only dreamt of, thanks to filtering programs that figure out what you want. They use various statistical models to analyse your choices — AOL has one called MyBestBets, which relies on something called Bayesian modelling — but the most interesting is a London-based web radio station, Last FM (www.last.fm).
Each time you play a song, you indicate whether or not you like it. Last FM remembers your choices and, using a system called collaborative filtering, compares them to other listeners to predict other music that you will favour. The idea is not entirely new — Launch.com was using collaborative filtering four years ago — but Last FM has a huge following. Try it, you never know what you’ll learn about yourself.