in short: we're more technologically advanced today than we were 100 years ago.

"He sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake. he knows if you've been bad or good...by the phone calls that you make!"

Thomas Campanella's piece, Eden by Wire: Webcameras and the Telepresent Landscape explores the advancement of technology in making distances shorter, providing more immediate images with a "telepresence" of sorts, and in an increase of surveillance in various aspects of the public sphere.  He first dotes upon the advent of the webcamera as something that made seeing beautiful sights possible to the average person.  Consequently, this new technology seemed to have the ability to shrink distances. He explains that the invention of the locomotive and the rail transport lead to the adoption of a uniform time standard in the United States.  He writes, "subsequent advances in transportation technology-fast steamers, the Suez Canal and eventually the airplane-osculated the great distances separating Europe, Asia, and America."  He explains that the telegraph and wireless radios made long distance communication a lot more feasible, radically altering the lives of nearly every human on the planet.

He goes on to talk a bit about the phenomenon that is the world wide web, and discusses the role "telepresence" plays there. What he means with this term is much more than simply webcamera technology.  He goes to on to explain what else it encompasses, using impossible to understand (albeit technical) terminology to advance his claims.  He concludes by conceding that the inherent weaknesses of the webcamera technology are nearly mitigated by the fact that their popularity has broadened their network and, consequently, enabled generally effective communication and broadened knowledge base.  He explains in the next section, "coffee pot to deep space" that the new technology made everything more accessible by the general public.  People who were formerly helpless were able to benefit from the advances of technology while exerting very little extra effort.

The last section warns of the dangers of this surveillance technology as a potentially massive invasion of privacy, something analogous to a "Big Brother" situation.  His warnings are timely considering the U.S. House of Representatives' disgustingly ironic decision on Thursday to call a "closed door session" to debate the newest surveillance legislation.