Your eyes are the tool through which your brain sees the world around it. They take in images and record what they see. If you can see a person's naked eyes, then they can see yours.
Cameras are basically the same thing, only they are mechanical instead of organic, and they record onto a medium other than brains. When people encounter cameras, they know that somebody is watching them, much as they know that when they see people's eyes.
If a person wants to communicate, they will always seek eyes. You can tell if a person is talking to you just by seeing who they are looking at. When a person looks into a camera, they are talking to whoever might be watching.
In general, when people look directly into a camera, it is disconcerting. This is because the camera is your eye. Watching through a camera, like in television or movies, is voyeuristic. People are acting normally, and you sit on the sidelines, watching. You do not consider yourself part of it, but then you realize that you are right there and they are looking at you.
On the other side of that, it is also disconcerting to see a person talking to nobody. A person whose gaze reaches neither eyes nor cameras, but still talks, seems to be communicating with an invisible person. We wonder what we are missing, or what the speaker must be missing, for this to be happening.
The target of one's gaze is important. It communicates volumes of information without a single word needed. It does not matter whether it is to eyes or to cameras; they are equally valid. But each one has its own unspoken understandings, and breaking those concepts comes with their own consequences.
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