An Exhaustive (But Incomplete) History of the Webcam An Exhaustive (But Incomplete) History of the Webcam Highsnobiety This story appears in HIGHTech, A Magazine by Highsnobiety. Our new issue, presented by Samsung, includes exclusive pages of interviews, shoots, merch, gadgets, technical gear and more. Order a copy here. Around the turn of the last century, videotelephony transformed almost overnight from science fiction into a daily routine for a sizable chunk of the world’s population. And following the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in January 2020, much of everyday life — work, friendship, sex, politics, and even mourning — has been forced through the lossy bandwidth of video chats. At its core, all videotelephonic tech is basically the same: your image is transmuted into a grid of pixels by a webcam, then compressed and reproduced on another user’s screen in something close to real time, give or take the inevitable lags and glitches. But that still doesn’t quite account for the choppy, uneven experience of life in the era of the webcam.