Webcams as cinematic medium – Creating chronotopes of the real

Abstract

This article focuses on webcams as a cinematic medium. It proposes an approach to studying the specific affected ownership, temporality, and filmic potential of the webcam. The article begins by advancing a differentiation between CCTV and webcams. Next, it proposes a synthesis of the notions of cinematic time and network time to analyse the webcam’s real-time footage and conceptualise a third term: ‘realtime’. Furthermore, the article outlines the webcam’s potential to generate cinematic chronotopes owing to their specific form of temporality.