How many times a day do we use the camera function on our cell phone? Whether we’re snapping a photo of a document or taking a picture of our lunch for Instagram, it’s hard to imagine what we’d do without the tiny camera built inside our phone.
It’s sometimes difficult to remember that the technology most of us take for granted today wasn’t readily available 20 years ago. Twitter users were reminded of that recently when a video, which was allegedly taken a couple of decades ago, features pop superstar Shakira seeing a cell phone take a photo for the first time.
While we’re not 100 percent sure when or where the video was shot, Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma posted the video and says it is footage of a “first time demo to an influential user … Shakira seeing camera phone for first time in Japan.”
In the video, a woman holds a flip phone towards Shakira to take a photo of her. Shakira points to the phone and asks, “Is that a camera?” and the woman answers in the affirmative. After snapping the photo, she shows it to Shakira on the device. “Oh, my gosh!” Shakira says seemingly shocked at what she is looking at.
Shakira then takes the phone and inspects it for a few seconds. “This one doesn’t work in America, no?” she asks the woman. “Imagine all the paparazzi.” The joke gets a laugh from the other people in the room, and Shakira hands the phone back.
Another woman in the group calls the camera phone a “dangerous tool” right before she realizes that it also captures video. Shakira then asks, “It’s a video camera?” The 43-second interaction is very science-fiction-y, especially with the ominous Stranger Things music playing in the background. But it does show how far we’ve come in such a short amount of time.
Now, we’re wondering how Shakira reacted the first time she heard her music coming out of an iPod.
