“As someone who’s deeply engaged with Africa, I’m thrilled by the potential of the camera phone. There are already half a billion cell phone subscribers on the continent, 95% of whom have pay-as-you-go plans. Most Africans will never have a land line, skipping an entire generation of communications technology. In the same way, most will never own a device that only makes pictures. Pay-as-you-go allows even the relatively poor to have a phone, and increasingly those phones have a camera. For most people, it’s their first camera, their first opportunity to represent themselves in photos, rather than to being photographed largely by professional outsiders. Social media gives them the means of reaching a large and distant audience. I have no idea what the consequences of this will be, but I bet they’ll be good, and it will be fun watching to find out. (By the way, what’s true for Africa is true of much of the developing world.)