We Are A Camera Poem by gershon hepner

Instead of great totalitarian eyes
controlled by an Orwellian Big Brother,
we’re all observed, and can obtain our highs
by making videotapes of one another.
While moving fingers write, and having writ,
produce a record only for the literate,
the moving record on a video bit
creates for all an image we can titter at.

The record of our lives may be distorted
by engineers or, like a painting, scumbled;
a film may blur the facts that are reported,
obscuring pictures, making scenes seem jumbled.
“I Am a Camera, ” said Isherwood
in Berlin in the 1930’s, now
we all when taped may be misunderstood––
updated myths beneath a Golden Bough.

David Hadju writes about the purchase by Google of YouTube, founded by Chad Hurley. Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, all early employees of PayPal, in “We Are a Camera” (NYT, October 15,2006) :

A generation has grown up with its childhood documented in near real-time on videos too long and dull to replay. With digital cameras, camera phones and the Web to disseminate everything now, moving images seem nearly as commonplace as written language. The world has become an inversion of Orwell’s long-dated vision of a future ruled by video; instead of being the objects of observation by a great totalitarian eye, we are all running about pointing digital video cameras, watching each other.



10/16/06