The Friday Fillip

The internet is a panopticon. Not the prison that Bentham designed (“a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.”) — that charming role has now fallen to CCTV, thankfully not on the public internet and not so widespread in Canada as it might be. No, I’m thinking of the humble, ubiquitous webcam. Thanks to those little devices and hundreds of thousands of volunteer computers, we can see pretty much whatever we might wish to, from wherever we might be: tourism as voyeurism (if it wasn’t that to begin with).

The very first webcam was a meagre thing pointed at the coffee pot in the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, and it wasn’t turned off until 9.45 a.m. on Wednesday 22nd August 2001, after ten years of dogged, dull life. To your left you see the very last image it took, a blurry, almost pathetic snap, from a doomed pioneer.

Things got a lot more interesting after that humble beginning. My personal favourite is the long-running live webcam, with accompanying audio, that is pointed at Pete’s Pond in Botswana. Right now I’m watching a magnificent elephant make its slow way to water — whoops! she’s been joined by the whole herd — much splashing — a mesmerizing sight.

Closer to home, there are webcams that open windows on Canada. I’ve found cams that give a great view of harbours in Halifax and in Vancouver. I know that it’s raining now in Iqaluit, sunny and busy in Charlottetown, overcast and quiet in Old Montreal, and sunny and peaceful in St. John’s.

For those who would like something a little… edgier, I point you to Opentopia, which features “random live webcams from the Net.” Opentopia lets you browse a random selection of hundreds of publicly available webcams and the cams of the careless — a great many people hook up webcams for security and other personal reasons and neglect to make them unavailable to the world at large. Right now on their front page they’ve got scenes from Austria, Turkey, Spain, Russia… (You can also see a list of available cams by country.)