A special kind of vertigo kicks in when you start clicking the camera icons scattered across the world map at World Watcher Live. Each one drops you into a live feed somewhere on Earth. A street vendor sets up shop off a busy street near the Teatro Amazonas in Manaus, Brazil, the bright orange canopy of his pop-up tent competing for attention with the theatre’s huge golden dome.
Blinkers flashing, a truck is making deliveries at a crossroads on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, while a cyclist in a black T-shirt shoots past. At Hwange Safari Lodge in Zimbabwe, a solitary warthog is slowly grazing across the scrub, while birds chatter in the background. Despite their wildly different settings, these feeds share a key trait: a complete lack of narrative and drama.
And that’s precisely the point, because what a glorious relief this is. Any time is a good time for a pint at Temple Bar in Dublin, Ireland. ( is is the internet as it once was: a window on the world, rather than a magnifier of outrage. Watching that warthog sampling the African veldt may be the sanest thing you’ll do online today.
And it may just be what the internet needs more of right now. This also feels like déjà vu. If you were “surfing” (as it was then called) the internet around the year 2000, this format and its unique selling proposition (USP) would be instantly familiar.
Webcams were one of the defining curiosities of the early web. And it all started with a coffee pot. In 1991, researchers at the University of Cambridge’s computer lab grew tired of trudging to the Trojan Room only to find the communal coffee pot empty.
They could have resolved to brew a fresh pot whenever this happened. But being computer nerds, they devised a less useful, more technical solution: They pointed a 128-by-128-pixel greyscale camera at the pot, transmitting a live stream of the coffee situation into the laboratory network. In 1993, this low-stakes surveillance project was connected to the then-fledgling World Wide Web, and became one of its earliest viral sensations.
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