Recently, in a dramatic expansion of human vision, millions of Web surfers have scanned the rock-strewn fields of Mars each day, through the lenses of the Mars Pathfinder. The images of the Red Planet that beamed onto my laptop had traveled through space to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., from where they were broadcast by NASA Select TV and mirrored worldwide on the Internet. The worldwide demand for the view from Mars broke Net records, and webcam coverage of Pathfinder marked the arrival of Web-based telephotography in the popular imagination. In the first seven days of the mission, more than 1 million video feeds were delivered to desktops around the globe. Today Mars, tomorrow your street corner.
Webcams are liminal agents, spores of geography in a placeless realm.
They link the world our bodies inhabit with the universe of information where we nourish our minds. The hundreds of sites that have gone live in the last few years represent a remarkable grass-roots effort to identify landmarks and stake out familiar terrain as we take deeper plunges into cyberspace. They are an effort to infuse an uncharted realm with keepsakes of place. If nothing else, webcams demonstrate that we are more attached to the physical landscape than we may care to admit, and that we possess a real longing to give these places meaning in cyberspace. Few sites better illustrate this than David Spector's Upper West Side webcamera on Columbus Avenue in New York.