At 6 years old, the World Wide Web is still just a toddler, yet I’m ceaselessly amazed at the signs of its transformative power already in evidence on the Internet. Consider the phenomenon of the “WebCam.”

Basically, a WebCam is a camera connected to the Web, so that Internet users all over the world can see whatever the camera sees. Steve Mann, for instance, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, goes around wearing a helmet with a video camera and antenna attached to it; using a transmitter strapped to his back, Mann sends live images of whatever his head happens to point at, images that are displayed on the World Wide Web at https://www-white.media.mit.e du/~steve/ netcam.html.

At first, this would seem like a prime example of Internet goofball humor, like the sites that tell you how much coffee is left in the office pot at the computer science department of South Succotash State. Predictably, WebCams are busting out all over the Internet; there are lists of these on Mann’s page, or from the Web Voyeur at https://www.eskimo.com/%7Eirving/web -voyeur/. Try the Yahoo index too; select Computers: Internet: Interesting Devices Connected to the Net: Spy Cameras. (Yahoo lists many other interesting devices connected to the Net too, such as a robot in Australia that you can control, if you figure out how.)

But Mann himself seems to regard his role as human WebCam in the context of privacy lost, noting on his home page that “video surveillance is growing out of control.” Now consider the digital camera at the intersection of Hollywood and Vine.


That’s right, there’s a digital camera pointing at one of the corners, installed by Beverly Hills Internet, a Southern California Internet company whose Web page, at https://www.bhi90210.com, displays the images the camera records. The company has another such camera pointed at a bus bench outside its Beverly Hills offices.

Typical previous WebCams gave you an exciting look at a couple of computer programmers on the other side of the world--who knew they were on the Web and still hadn’t taken the trouble to dress any better. Steve Mann and Beverly Hills Internet have taken the WebCam to another fascinating, somewhat troubling level.

First, the fun part. Think ahead, oh, five years. Imagine a time when there is enough bandwidth so that you won’t just be seeing still images, but, rather, live video. The possibilities are incredible. It’s really not far-fetched to assume that sometime in the not-so-distant future, all of us will be able to pay a real-time visit to the heart of any major city. Sitting here in the wintertime sunshine, for instance, we could swoop down onto Madison Avenue, into the kind of generic human-bustle scene so familiar from television: a Manhattan street full of people in winter clothes, huffing along in the cold.

What the World Wide Web is giving you today is a glimpse at the virtual presence of tomorrow. If you can watch a series of still images of guys in a lab in Perth, why can’t you use the Net to visit your mother in real time in Pittsburgh? Meet with a business prospect in Chicago? Or study with an expert in Paris? Think how the world would shrink, how human knowledge might spread, how crime could be fought.


Think also of the trouble we might be in for. For instance, none of us want the eyes of Big Brother on us in our own home, but what about on Wilshire Boulevard? It’s a public street, after all. How about in a shopping mall? How about in the workplace? Could the advent of the WebCam and the global reach of the Internet lead to a radical reduction in privacy? Will every move we make be videotaped?

As multimedia moves into cyberspace, it raises a more immediate issue. Right now, most of us on the Net are known by the words we write and nothing more; thus the classic New Yorker cartoon of one pooch, at a computer, explaining to another that “On the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog.”

Soon, however, very soon indeed, your presence in cyberspace will go beyond mere writing. Already you can download software that makes it easy to attach voice messages to CompuServe e-mail. Will my correspondents think differently of me when they hear my New York twang? Won’t it be easier to tell, from voice alone, who is black and who is white? Pretty soon, I’m afraid, it will be obvious on the Internet whether or not you’re a dog, a change many of us canines will regret.

Then again, maybe it won’t be so bad after all. Internet voice mail won’t replace written e-mail, even if you speak the words into your computer instead of typing them. After all, a reader can take in more words per minute than a listener. And in such a large, mobile, anonymous world, many people want more than anything to be known; witness the explosion in personal Web pages. Or just visit https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Obituary/memorial.html, where the Web remembers the dead. It’s not much yet, but mark my words, in one form or another, it will be.


*

Daniel Akst, a Los Angeles writer, is a former assistant business editor for technology at The Times. He welcomes messages at akstd@news.latimes.com but regrets that he cannot always reply.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

You Are There!


For an interesting use of the WebCam, check out the Cambridge Panorama, offered by Olivetti at https://www.cam-orl.co.uk/ cgi-bin/pangen. It’s a live, clickable shot of Cambridge, England. Click on the Cambridge University library, for instance, and if your browser is properly configured, you can telnet directly to it.