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Science Quote by Jim Fowler

"Everybody has a camcorder now, and they exploit these incidents and blow them all out of proportion"

About this Quote

There is a faintly irritated generational sigh baked into Jim Fowler's line: a world where the camcorder has become a second pair of eyes, always open, always ready to turn the unexpected into spectacle. Fowler, best known as a wildlife scientist and television naturalist, is speaking from inside a media ecosystem he helped build, where "incidents" in nature once had to be patiently witnessed, interpreted, and narrated by professionals. Now they can be captured instantly by anyone and, crucially, edited into something else: a story with villains, jump cuts, and outrage.

The verb "exploit" does the heavy lifting. It's not just documentation he's criticizing but the incentive structure around it: attention converts chaos into content. "Blow them all out of proportion" is a warning about scale. A rare animal attack, a freak weather moment, a single alarming clip becomes stand-in evidence for broader claims about the wild, about danger, about decline - or, depending on the audience, about human stupidity. The camcorder doesn't lie, but it can still distort by selection: what gets recorded is what shocks, and what shocks gets replayed until it feels like the norm.

Coming from a scientist, the subtext is epistemic: data is not the same as narrative, and visibility is not the same as understanding. Fowler is pushing back against a culture that confuses proof with perspective - where the mere fact of capture is treated as final authority, and context becomes collateral damage.

Quote Details

TopicTechnology
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Fowler, Jim. (2026, January 17). Everybody has a camcorder now, and they exploit these incidents and blow them all out of proportion. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/everybody-has-a-camcorder-now-and-they-exploit-73959/

Chicago Style
Fowler, Jim. "Everybody has a camcorder now, and they exploit these incidents and blow them all out of proportion." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/everybody-has-a-camcorder-now-and-they-exploit-73959/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Everybody has a camcorder now, and they exploit these incidents and blow them all out of proportion." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/everybody-has-a-camcorder-now-and-they-exploit-73959/. Accessed 23 Feb. 2026.

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Proliferation of Camcorders: Jim Fowler's Perspective
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About the Author

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Jim Fowler (born April 9, 1932) is a Scientist from USA.

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