So in context, the questions aren’t inappropriate—they’re just the wrong questions. (For the record, Justin points the camera high while taking bio-breaks, and he disappointed his fans recently by leaving his rig behind when he accompanied a young woman to her bedroom.) They miss the real significance of Justin.tv, in part because the site is promoted as high-concept entertainment, a realization of the movie plots of “EdTV” and “The Truman Show.”
Justin, 23, is only the first “lifecaster” in what is planned to be an entire network of people you can watch day and night, while participating in the snarky on-screen forums that run in a box underneath the video feed. Next will be a New York City fashionista living a real-life “Sex and the City” existence, and a citizen journalist living in Iowa during primary season. Revenue, as with Justin’s show, will come from ads and product placements.
But voyeurism is merely the trigger for a revolution that promises, or threatens, to make Justins of us all. “In the next two years lifecasting will grow from one person in the world to something that’s available for everyone,” says Michael Siebel, a Justin.tv executive. Cameras will one day shrink to the size of buttons, making the process less intrusive. Why stop at blogging when you can be lifecasting?
The kind of technology developed by Justin.tv may one day be crucial in allowing all of us—not just exhibitionists—to create a definitive archive of everything that ever happened to us. (Traditionalists may blanch, but young people are already comfortable with using tech to document their lives.) The Justin-ites have serious competition here, as some industry giants have been working on this for years. Since 2001, Gordon Bell, a 72-year-old computing legend now at Microsoft Research, has been heading a project called “My Life Bits.” The idea is to accumulate a definitive record of one’s life, from images and sounds captured by a “SenseCam,” to phone calls, e-mail, Web searches and so on—and then to develop techniques to search those disparate media on demand. You won’t be surprised to hear that Google is also developing its own solutions to searching video and audio. And a start-up called Ustream (now in beta) lets anyone do Webcasts live—sort of Justin.tv lite.
The ability to make such archives is a Pandora’s box for the digital age. It has the potential to restore to us the priceless experiences our faulty memories have cruelly discarded. It also opens up a pretty thorny mess of issues. What happens to privacy if everyone becomes an unwilling extra in someone else’s marathon movie? Will copyright holders demand royalties when their songs and television programs play in the background of your life? What rules of etiquette, or decency, determine whether you’re recording or not?
And what if a first kiss, replayed 50 years later on a wide screen, is not as magical as we would have remembered it otherwise? Maybe Justin, in his moment of romance, had the right idea by leaving the camera in the kitchen.
