Image revolution

The first cellphone images were just the blurry backs of commuters trying to shuffle their way through a disabled London subway car. Then of subway exits as the dazed and injured stumbled their way out. The first major public disaster to occur in the era of the ubiquitous picture phone, as noted by Times staff writer Matea Gold on Friday, produced ghostly greenish-black images that were affecting but blurry.

Still, it was a breakthrough moment for a new technology. Commuters and passersby with phones thought to record the images. They thought to contact news organizations and offer them. A photo blog called FlickR carried this message from a photo agency: “World Picture Network would like to see any images from the London Terror Attack taken by any member of the public ... on a mobile phone, PDA or digital camera.... Please pass this message around to as many people as you can.”

This is the formation before our eyes of a new “smart mob,” the title bestowed by media futurist Howard Rheingold in his 2002 book. He saw that wireless, digitally connected groups would formally and informally continue to embrace the newest technologies to act in concert (for instance, use of digital communication to direct anti-globalization street protests and political gatherings.)

The images on FlickR and other blogs Thursday were generally disorganized, many of them just screen shots of TV images or snaps of instant street memorials in London and elsewhere. A few showed fleeing subway riders. None carried trenchant commentary beyond a label.

Yet what is emerging from London will teach would-be cellphone photographers worldwide. As in an anthill or beehive, expertise will spread.

Phones now record and transmit short, rough videos as well as increasingly clear photographs. Artists are mounting exhibits of cellphone candids. Others worry about the effect of cellphones on privacy, with good reason. But as with the Internet, or the telephone, or the telegraph, the course of a technological revolution that is open to the people won’t be easily predicted or controlled. It will certainly be interesting.