Cameraphone perverts of the world beware: the American government is after you.
Well, not the entire government - yet, anyway. According to the Camera Phone Predator Alert Act - a piece of legislation submitted to Congress by New York Republican Peter King - all camphones could be required by law to make a clicking sound when a picture is taken.
It's understandable, I suppose, given people's fear of sex crime and concerns about being spied on. At least if somebody's perving on you, there's a noise that you can pick up on and give them a slap (or at least a stern talking to).
But there's also something that feels terribly anachronistic about this whole process: after all, they're effectively saying "let's make a way to create the fake sound of an artificial process that acts as a social cue".
This isn't quite the same as creating a synthetic reality by spraying a pine-scented air freshener around the house, even if the last time you actually went strolling through the lofty pines was back in Scouts.
It's an acceptance of the social norm is more important than the reality. A fake camera noise - itself the result of a basically irrelevant, abstracted technological process - is more socially acceptable than no noise at all.
It's a similar thing with electric cars, which many people think should make 'car-like' noises to stop people getting run over.
What if cameras and cars had never made a noise in the first place? We'd have different social norms. Should we be stuck with these ones?
(via Gadget Lab)
