Now that I'm here at National Geographic's live "crane cam," I can't look away. I just know that 400,000 migrating birds are going to enter the frame at any second. Any second. Oh wait. It says sunrise and sunset are the good times to watch. Maybe I'll go check on some guy's fish tank in the meantime. Or those cows in Sweden I found the other day.
Such is the interior monologue of the webcam addict. Sure, sites dedicated to sweaty amateur pornography get all the attention, but many of us are glued to utterly innocent, often mind-crushingly dull vistas.
We lost interest in Jenni-Cam, the infamous 24-hour live website (now defunct jennicam.org) featuring web designer Jennifer Ringley.
We'd rather check the traffic on the freeway before we leave for work. We set up security webcams on our cottages and then just sit there and watch them from our desks at work.
A colleague of mine so misses Vancouver she happily logs on to grainy traffic cams in that city. Patrons of a laundromat in Florida can log into a webcam to see if the machines are free.
We watch birds. We watch plants grow. And we even watch other boring people sitting on their couches. (I'm not kidding: You can watch a member of the National Council of Dull Men watching TV).
Toronto teacher Amy Powell watches her puppy Fender when she visits the spa/kennel Urban Dog. While Fender's security was presumably assured after the first webcam viewing, Powell's continued puppy voyeurism is something else.
"I'm the most obsessive dog owner," she says. "When I drop Fender off, she cries, so when I can see that her tail is wagging, I feel better. It's addictive. Even when Fender's not there, I watch."
Powell dropped Fender off recently on a weekend, to spend an unencumbered day with her husband. "It was a nice break."
Did she visit the webcam? "Of course."
Toronto webcam entrepreneur Gilbert Verghese started his Eagletron company in 2001, creating a robotic camera mount that moves webcams around. Today, he figures there are 30 million webcams worldwide — he's seen them on sale for as little as $5 — and he runs a roster of Eagletron customer sites.
None of them is pornographic.
"It's the whole reality aspect of it," Verghese says. "You know it's real, it's live, it's unscripted. You don't know what's going to happen. If you are an enthusiast, a birdwatcher, for instance, you have to go do this; you can't miss it."
A colleague of mine monitors three bird-watching websites regularly. She says there are payoffs to make up for frustrating frozen cameras and jerky angles.
"I think the appeal is like playing the lottery: One of these times you're going to log on and see something great," she says. "Mostly you see just an empty feeder or a motionless mother bird sitting on eggs. But every once in a while a pileated woodpecker shows up at the Indiana webcam (see sidebar). Usually it's American goldfinches and chickadees."
She and other birders tell me the peregrine falcon sites are most rewarding.
"They seem to be able to get the camera closer, particularly the Buffalo site (see sidebar). They are also the most interesting because you get to see the eggs, watch them hatch and see the chicks grow and learn to feed themselves and then learn to fly.
"Sometimes mama comes back to the nest with something really disgusting she's killed to feed to them."
On the less-action-packed front, Verghese's site led me to "Farm in Sweden." Beside the image of a bleak, snowy image, the enticing text read: "Two cameras can be moved inside my frosty window, where all my cows sometimes are sleeping."
The ESL grammar alone merits a double click.
You can't underestimate the appeal of the banal. The most quotidian webcams can cause a sensation: A German website made the news this week after attracting more than a million viewers to watch a family of wild boar (the babies are cute.)
None of this should be surprising, considering the medium's first subject. In 1991, a bunch of programmers at the Cambridge Computer Laboratory solved the problem of showing up to find their coffee pot empty by fixing a webcam on it. It ran for 10 years, with the notorious coffee pot fetching about $10,000 from Spiegal Online of Germany. Banal sells.
Hamilton resident Keith Clark watches ships. He and his wife are planning a cruise in the South Pacific, so he has taken to watching a "bridgecam" mounted on the Tahitian Princess. That's a lot of panoramic ocean shots. The day we speak, a port is, thankfully, in view.
"She's just coming into French Polynesia," Clark says. "You get a new view every minute. It's kind of cool. Looks like she's in dock now. About an hour ago, she was quite far out, you could see the island in the background."
Clark admits that it's not a goose bump a minute. "It's neat to watch, although it's getting boring now."
Bird enthusiast Alexandra Eadie — she runs the webcam-less Ontario Field Ornithologists site — watches both birding and weather radar cams when migrations are under way.
Eadie understands the compulsion. "That's the nature of people. They make a simple hobby more complex," she says. "You keep going back and looking. They're like wallpaper. "
And sometimes, they can even be used in a Little Brother way.
Clark, a retired educator, recalls visiting an Adult Learning Centre when a student called an instructor to say he was late because of a traffic jam. The instructor logged onto a Ministry of Transportation traffic cam site and found the exact intersection. "It was clear as a bell. There was no traffic jam," he says. "He sheepishly had to admit he had slept in."
And as the technology advances, privacy issues will no doubt intensify. Webcams haven't been very successful infiltrating the daycare industry, for instance. "Privacy issues are going to surface, but our need to see beyond our immediate surroundings is so important that it's going to keep spreading," Verghese says.
The latest is webcam-compatible cellphones that can message you when, say, a motion sensor is tripped at your business or home, and log you right on. Insurance companies love these things: Verghese says they are starting to give breaks to people with webcams fixed on their homes.
The obvious irony to all this obsessive viewing is that we want to reserve the right to turn off the cameras. While we don't we don't mind getting wired in the name of entertainment or personal security, we rail against photo radar in Edmonton or surveillance cams on London street corners.
"People are becoming sensitive to who can see me, not whether there is a camera or not," Verghese says.
"I think historically laws are more strict on voice transmission than video. If there's a Watergate with webcam, we might get to that stage. Right now, that's not the case, which is why video surveillance is everywhere."
And rest assured that the pictures will just keep getting clearer. Verghese's latest creation is a system that allows you to use your camcorder.
"You get much better quality zoom — you can zoom in on a licence plate from 100 feet away. You can't do that with a webcam. It gets pixelated."
Now, that's what these crane people need. Speaking of which, if you'll excuse me, I have to go check the site. I'm sure they'll be here any minute.
