Video technology creates a few very-public lives
By publicly broadcasting what once were private moments, lifecasters are giving new meaning to the term ‘candid camera’
Kevin Lim was positively draped in technology as he walked into a crowded Amherst tavern on a recent Saturday.
He had a small camera clipped to his baseball cap, another camera on one shoulder, an iPod and small speakers on the other shoulder, and a laptop and video recorder in his backpack.
Lim is a technophile, a blogger and — his preferred term — a social cyborg. He shoots video and broadcasts it, often live, to the Web.
“It was put very succinctly by a friend who was watching this, and he said when he looked at my camera, he looked at it as if it were a third eye,” Lim said. “Through this third eye, it’s like a thousand eyes watching me.”
Lim is one of a small but growing number of people who record large chunks of their lives on video and share them, instantly, with the wider world.
This very public broadcasting of mostly private, everyday moments is called lifecasting or livecasting.
While Lim and a few others take their cameras on the road, most lifecasters do it from home. From there they stream live footage for hours or days at a time.
Most, including a handful from Buffalo, have modest followings at best. But a few have become major online celebrities.
“It was interesting to just watch someone every step that they take,” said D. J. Wilson, a single father in South Buffalo who has watched other lifecasts and done his own since 2007.
The transmission of these videos is raising legal and ethical issues, and the recent case of a young man who killed himself while broadcasting live online stirred a controversy.
Further, as more cameras pop up on hats, in homes and on poles above street corners, the increased possibility of unwittingly being recorded is threatening our privacy — or at least changing how we define the concept.
“The tools are available to make every moment of your life public, or at least publicly accessible,” said Michael Stefanone, a University at Buffalo assistant professor of communication who studies social technology. “The question is what are the implications of having all of this information available?”
Until recently, the technology and skills required for lifecasting weren’t accessible to the general public.
Today, cameras are smaller and more powerful and, matched with wireless Web access, combine to make lifecasting possible for pros and amateurs alike.
“This ability to see how people are living their everyday life, from a scholarly perspective it’s a great resource,” said Alex Halavais, a tech enthusiast and assistant professor of communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn.
Most lifecasters are anonymous and have few followers on the Web. One exception is Justin Kan, a founder of the Justin.tv lifecasting network.
The San Francisco resident started broadcasting his life in early 2007, drawing a legion of followers and spawning a series of imitators.
Many lifecasters seem to be attention- seekers, some have a cause or business interest to promote, and others are simply playing with technology.
Wilson, who is raising a daughter, Juliet, 6, started his own lifecast in March 2007.
He did it nearly full time for about a year, streaming video from his home and with a mobile camera setup.
Wilson would broadcast his trips to the butcher shop, baking cookies with his daughter — even when he went to bed.
“[If I woke up during the night] I’d open my laptop and there’d be 15 people just watching me sleeping,” he said.
He was careful about what he showed on his Justin.tv channel. For example, he muted the sound when he gave his phone number or address to someone over the phone.
Wilson said viewer feedback helped him get through difficult times when his daughter had open-heart surgery for pulmonary stenosis.
But the stress of lifecasting every day wore him down.
“You tend to get burned out after a year of doing it,” said Wilson, who still broadcasts his life occasionally.
Kevin Lim doesn’t shoot video of himself 24-7.
The Singapore native and UB graduate student is an early technology adopter who started broadcasting his life on-and-off last year, and his equipment has become more streamlined since then.
He now has the camera attached to his cap that lets him stream live video over a wireless Internet connection through a netbook — a smaller, cheaper laptop — in his backpack.
The camera on his backpack shoulder strap records higher-quality video footage for later use in podcasts and for posterity.
One 18-minute video, shot in Singapore in 2007, shows Lim taking a bus, talking to his viewers through an elevator mirror, chatting with a professor in his office and ordering lunch.
Lim typically broadcasts when he’s attending tech-related conferences and events, serving people who can’t make it there.
“I become a conduit,” he said.
Lim acknowledges that there are downsides. His Web viewers send text messages or Twitter notes that can overwhelm Lim. There are technology-related issues as well; sometimes Lim’s Internet connection fails, or he runs out of battery life.
Halavais, the Quinnipiac faculty member, has lifecasted for a day or so on a few occasions, but he was more interested in the public’s reaction than in what he was getting on camera.
He let people know they were being recorded on his Web cam.
“Some people were really set off by this and did not want to talk to me,” said Halavais, who previously taught at UB.
Stefanone noticed Lim’s camera while sitting on a panel with him.
“That’s when I realized he was streaming,” Stefanone said. “It was a little unsettling, actually. My actions weren’t as natural. . . . Our conversation certainly wasn’t just between us.”
Does anyone really watch this stuff? Wilson said that at times as many as 75 people watched his Justin.tv lifecasts.
But a New York Times review of the site’s most viewed channels last year found an average of just 44 viewers at any one time.
One aspect of lifecasting that cannot be ignored is the privacy and ethics considerations it generates.
As the practice grows in popularity, people will have to worry more about being captured on camera in public, in an office or at a friend’s house.
Should lifecasters have to notify people that they are on camera? Should they obscure the face of someone who is captured on camera — a task made more difficult if it’s a live broadcast?
And what does it mean for our accepted understanding of privacy if we willingly broadcast our own lives to an online audience? These cameras are capturing formerly private and, occasionally, disturbing moments.
A controversy broke out last month when a 19-year-old in Florida talked about killing himself on a bodybuilding site and then took a fatal overdose of prescription medicine live on camera as people watched and commented through a link to Justin.tv.
The college student’s family was deeply critical of the lifecasting site and of the viewers who didn’t seem to take the victim’s suicide attempt seriously until it was too late.
Stefanone said the incident raises the question of how responsible someone is to a person he knows through many social technologies but not in person. As lifecasting and other social media grow in use, these issues will have to be addressed.
“We are rethinking the things that we’ve taken for granted,” Lim said. “Whether it’s privacy, identity, or so on. What’s happening is we are re-evaluating these things. Because the status quo just isn’t enough.”
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