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Grosso: What's A Camera?

As should have been anticipated, phone cameras are leading to a much different form of behavior than traditional cameras or even digital cameras. People really are capturing the moment. Japanese women snapping photos of magazines right in the bookstore and geeks imaging slides right in the middle of a conference.William Grosso asks, "what is a camera, anyway?"

The key distinction of a phone camera is that it's intimately integrated with a communication device. If you investigate the user's mental model, they're not "taking photos", they're "sending messages". Which is why folks focused strictly on the photographic quality of these devices just won't get it.

So maybe Grosso's question should be, "why do we even call them cameras?".

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