Indy Media: The Camcorder's Impact

Every time you point your camcorder and push the record button, you're recording history.

Seriously. Even though you may think it's just another birthday video full of screaming children, there's more to it than that. You are (perhaps unwittingly) helping to document the age in which we live. In just a few decades, if those tiny magnetic particles on the tape manage to hold their charge, the stuff that's on that birthday video could make a social historian search through a dozen archives just for the chance to take a look.

If you don't believe me, watch some home movies shot a mere twenty or thirty years ago. Look at the hair styles, the clothing, the knick-knacks on the coffee table; notice the books on the shelves, the car in the driveway, the style of the curtains. That's history, every bit as much as the building of the pyramids in Egypt or the defeat of the Spanish Armada.

Of course, there's always the chance that you'll find yourself in the right place at the right time and capture one of these greater historical events on tape. It happened to a guy named Zapruder (though he was using film, not videotape); chances are, with the growing number of camcorders in the world, it'll continue to happen in the future.

In this article, we'll take a look at the camcorder and its role in the course of human history. But before we do this, we'll take a little philosophical journey and attempt to shed some light on the power of the moving image (something we tend to take for granted in this day and age). We'll also try to look into the future and see what effect the camcorder will have upon the course of human events.

So whether you're out shooting a presidential motorcade on some grassy knoll, or you're just at home taping the kids, be sure to keep it steady and in focus--you could be making more than video. You could be making hist…