Wonderful Webcams: About Active Gazes and Invisible Technologies. Sci Technol Hum Val 2011; 36: 451–473. doi: 10.1177/0162243910366134

How do technologies such as webcams influence health care and what concepts may describe this? This article explores the literature and analyses what people looking through webcams do within a particular health care practice in the Netherlands, that is, within the rehabilitation of people suf-fering from severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) or asthma. Several ways to describe the activities webcams support and per-form are identified. The webcam is (1) concentrating the activities of its users, by making them focus on the task at hand and (2) magnifies the char-acteristics of the already existing relationships between webcam users by imposing a relational distance that fits best with intimate contacts. (3) Although webcams shift notions of space and distance, their working appears to be related, to a great extent, to their location