Pet Peeve: "webcam"

[sparr]

This is not specifically aimed at you, person who prompted me to post. It is aimed at the masses.

Having a camera, no matter how cheap, grainy, or spherical, attached to your computer does not make it a webcam. The defining trait of a webcam is how it is used, namely, to take photos or video directly to the web. If you take a snapshot to your hard drive, and eventually put it on your website, you are just using a really cheap camera in the same way any other camera would be used. Until I can see a real-time updated view of you (or your dog, or your garden, or whatever else the camera is pointed at) on the web, it is not a webcam.

</rant>

Comments

[miketodd13.livejournal.com]

Ah, and now we get into the semantics issue. To fast forward a bit, the point of communication is to convey ideas. We have rules for language and definitions because otherwise, we wouldn't be able to convey ideas very well. Language evolves. A word might start out with one root, meaning a particular thing, and years later mean something completely different because of how people have taken to using it.

Example: decimate. Here I will be a hypocrite, and say that it does somewhat annoy me when people misuse this term. Its original meaning was to take/destroy a tenth of. But it's come to mean more the reverse of that through common parlance. And in fact the incorrect usage has become so common, that it is now correct.

I feel that the same thing applies here.

Another good point you mention is usage of the device versus terminology. If you hit someone over the head with a gun, you still call it a gun, not a club. But to bastardize the word "webcam" into a verb, I wholeheartedly agree with you that people are not "webcamming" when they are taking pictures or videos and posting them, any more than someone is "shooting" in the above example.

[sparr0.livejournal.com]

I will acquiesce to your usage with video chat software. My primary issue is with the misuse of the word when someone is just taking a picture, like they would with any camera (USB, P&S, DSLR, whatever). If you point the device at something and press a button to take a single picture, it is a "camera". "webcam" specifically denotes (and always has, imho) streaming video (or at least some facsimile thereof).

[miketodd13.livejournal.com]

Ah, I wasn't clear on that point -- in the original post you seemed to make a note of specifically streaming it to the web, so I thought the "web" part of the "webcam" was what you were concentrating on.

In which case, like I said... I agree wholeheartedly. If someone buys a webcam but never uses it to stream video, then it's really no more than a low-quality digital camera (and one that isn't very portable, at that).