"Everybody has a camcorder now, and they exploit these incidents and blow them all out of proportion"
About this Quote
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
| Topic | Technology |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
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.






