A scary War of the Worlds webcam to help distract you from the horrors on your computer screen.

Moving pictures. Time was that the ability to create these hypnotic rectangles of motion was held in the hands of a select few.These camera-wielding wizards captured reality with their whirring machines, then spewed the results back out onto a wall or a screen. Humans, simpletons that we are, sat mesmerised.

Television cemented the medium at the heart of modern life, thrusting an ever expanding range of non-static images before the eyes of the world. Then came home video, placing movie creation directly into the sweaty, calloused hands of the public. At once, the visual data from thousands upon thousands of globally insignificant entities and events - babies, weddings, bondage sessions - were sucked out of the physical world and recorded for the benefit of future generations. Historians in the centuries to come would not suffer from the information blackouts which blight our knowledge of the past, we thought.

We were wrong. Anyone studying the late 20th century would just end up thinking we spent all our time getting married. Or, more likely, they would waste an afternoon failing to work out what a VHS cassette is, before flinging the whole sorry collection into their Incini-Bin 3000. And that would have been a narrow escape, because home video is universally dull. Reliving nuptials might be fun for the couple involved, but for the the rest of us it's just marginally more appealing than watching ants eat your own leg.

Despite this democratisation of filming, camcorders fell short in one key department: exposure. The best the budding cinematographer could hope for was to send their tape in to You've Been Framed to net £250 and ten seconds of indirect fame for a clip of someone falling off a jet ski. The internet has changed that. In this era of broadband and YouTube, getting your footage "out there" involves less effort than punching yourself in the face. Modern home computing has turned you, me and everyone else with a PC into star, director and publisher, with the result being a kind of video event horizon, an unfathomably deep digital primordial soup in which a seemingly infinite number of monkeys aimlessly bang their opinionated furry heads against an infinite number of disinterested screens.

But occasionally some edible flotsam arises to the surface of this quagmire of white noise. If you've ever gazed at these notorious internet big hitters and wished you could be in their place, an easy way to set about it is to get your hands on a webcam. These largely dull peripherals plug into your PC then stare at you from the surface of your desk with their lone gaping eye, enabling you to project your ugly mush into the ethereal wasteland of the world wide web. There are options, however, for office-bound filmmakers with a taste for the unusual. Flynn Product Design has come up with a War of the Worlds-esque creation - currently available under licence -

It's heartening to see a camera which accurately recreates the horrors of the Internet video cesspool in a physical form. We'd get one for the shed, but we're a bit scared to fall asleep with one in the room.