“Does anybody not have a camera on them right now?” Avery McCarthy asked the audience of more than a hundred people gathered at the School of Visual Arts Theater in Manhattan. No one raised their hands. “Anybody? There are zero people in this room that don’t have a camera on them? Ok. Think about that.”

Most people in the room were counting their phone as a camera, underlining the message of the documentary Brave New Camera, by directors and fellow SVA alums McCarthy and Kara Hayden. The film explores the profound effects of internet-enabled cameras, emphasizing what it may mean for human communication, social identity, and more.

Images are becoming an ever more fundamental mode of communication. The phenomenon and its implications are interesting, but also difficult to grasp. McCarthy and Hayden were at SVA to discuss the topic’s many facets with a panel of highly notable figures in the visual arts and sciences. It was exactly the kind of conversation that Brave New Camera hopes to initiate.

“Nothing gets adopted in our culture this quickly, unless it taps into a core genetic impulse that we have from millions of years ago,” McCarthy told me over coffee in Brooklyn a few days after the panel. “I think that the desire to construct a personality that’s attractive to your social group and raise your status or say something important or just to show people who you are or what you’re doing, it’s a really core part of what it is to be a human being.”

The trailer for Brave New Camera ends with the line, “Our whole cognitive framework is shifting.”

It’s hard to believe just how explosively camera technology has grown. According to McCarthy’s data, about a trillion images were created last year, more every minute than in the entire 20th century combined. Some two billion images are uploaded every single day through services like Instagram. With more than a billion smartphones shipped every year, cameras are now among the most ubiquitous technologies on the planet.