Private Eyes : Making a home video has become so easy that nothing is too mundane or too weird for tape.

For a moment, put aside the grainy scene of Los Angeles policemen bloodying a lone black man while a bystander records every tragic blow with his new video camera.

Forget the chaos in Detroit on the Fourth of July when a man at a fireworks display randomly videotaped a girls’ gang beating up two bystanders.

And briefly put aside Newsweek, which coined “video vigilantes” last week to describe common folk with camcorders who capture the spectacular and send it overnight to CNN.

In other words, forget the important, insistent or socially unjust and for just a second think about yearbooks, doorbells, treasure hunts, camp counselors, grandma’s strudel, diaries, funerals, stag parties, employee training.

And Boy Scouts. It is now possible for scouts to earn a merit badge for video production just the way they can for rubbing two sticks together to start a fire. It is also now a snap for Mina Johnson, a fledgling Los Angeles screenwriter, to depict her life on video the way Jane Austen might have portrayed a young woman unraveling her thoughts by writing in a diary.

For each of the last seven years, Johnson, 27, has made a one-hour video of herself comfortably sunk in a chair and rambling about her life. She never watches these 1/2-inch video diaries; rather, she says, she’ll wait 30 years to take a look.

“I think of this as a tool to show my kids when they’re older, the stages their mother went through,” says Johnson, who has no children yet. “I want it to kind of explode in my brain when I see who I was.”

In the last few years, the ability to make a home video has become so easy that it seems nothing is too mundane, too routine, too personal, too complicated or too weird to be scrutinized by a camcorder--the camera that sees and hears all, no matter how dark the scene, how quiet the sound.

With each generation, the camcorder gets smaller, lighter, easier to operate and more affordable. With an $800 camera, a hobbiest can now produce quality video similar to what professionals produce with $50,000 worth of equipment. The same goofy family scenes that cost $7 for a minute of film (Remember the stuff that had to be threaded through the projector while someone put up the screen and turned off the lights?) now cost $2 for hours of instant record-and-review video tape.

Nearly one in six American families owns a camcorder, compared to the Stone Age--1985--when one in 30 had one. That year, a mere half-million camcorders were sold; this year, the consumer electronics trade group predicts sales of 3.3 million.

Tom Weinberg, executive producer of “The 90s”--a critically acclaimed show on PBS that airs collages of home videos made by amateur producers around the country--says we are again outwitting ourselves with technology that is changing our perspective on the world.

“Now that camcorders are so available, television has a different credibility factor because very little of what we see on TV now doesn’t pass the test of ‘I could have done that myself,’ ” says Weinberg.

A self-described “grizzled video veteran,” Weinberg was among a small group of 1970s documentary makers who called themselves “video freaks” and used 30 pounds of equipment to produce shows about the national political conventions.

“Now, everywhere, people use video to express an opinion, and shows like mine and ‘America’s Funniest Home Videos’ are growing in popularity because the viewer looks at the tape and says, ‘I believe what I see because it’s not filtered through some TV programmer. I believe this is reality.’ ”

Ubiquitous and persistent, the videomakers, camcorder operators, video artists--whatever you want to call them--constantly find new reasons to transfer life’s realities onto High 8. (That’s videospeak for high-resolution 8-millimeter videotape.)

People use these hand-held or shoulder-schlepped devices to get rich, get famous or just embarrass each other. There’s the camp counselor who has become an entrepreneur by recording his campers and selling tapes to parents at summer’s end. And there’s the young woman who could never get her grandmother to write down her strudel recipe. She made a video with close-ups of grandma’s knobby hands and her accented instructions to “use a pinch of this and a handful of that.”

There are also the mean-spirited, those who play dirty tricks on animals and make a whole show of them. And there are the good citizens: A man in Southern California wanted a stop sign on a wickedly dangerous corner, so he spent days video taping near-accidents. After he turned his tapes over to his city council, a stop sign was erected.

Birth to death, the action is on video.

Actors Demi Moore and Bruce Willis had three video cameras rolling during the delivery of their first child--with Moore pushing, Willis catching and a few friends watching.

The last moments of a person’s life are also available on tape. A woman called the editor of Videomaker magazine and asked what would be the best equipment to capture her dying daughter’s last days. Funeral directors in some cities offer to tape ceremonies following the coffin all the way to graveside.

And what about sex?

Yes, America has long been going at it in front of a camcorder atop a tripod, reviewing the tapes, showing them to friends, playing them back as another avenue to find variation and contrast. Some label this homemade erotica as pornography; others say it’s as wholesome as buying sexy lingerie for the wife. In a mall.

In fact, people are so used to the cinema verite look produced by home videos--the grainy scenes shot at funny angles--that professionals borrow it to make advertisements and movies.

A whole generation is so used to seeing itself on television that for some young people, there is a blurring of the lines of where the signal comes from, according to Leo Braudy, author of several books on popular culture and the Leo S. Bing professor of English at USC.

Braudy says his oft-videoed 3-year-old grandson, a rock ‘n roll aficionado, spontaneously jumped on stage to perform with a mariachi band while vacationing in Mexico. Says Braudy: “The video camera is so often there, it creates a self-consciousness, the sense that we’re always being looked at. It’s a way to create a more perfect self.”

Videography has gone so far beyond Jane Fonda’s relentless smile and taut diaphragm that there is even a man out there making money selling videos that demonstrate how to lay asphalt on the front walk.

A Nashville, Tenn., firm is one of several that produces video yearbooks to give a graduate 30 minutes of memories for $40. A Cincinnati firm has pioneered one of the dozens of ways video cameras are used for surveillance: The Ohio company sells “video doorbells” so visitors can be spied on before they’re invited beyond the front door.

There are contests, festivals and support groups for camcorder operators as far and wide as Atlanta, Los Angeles and Carbondale, Ill. Scott Blumberg, a New York videographer, travels around the country organizing “treasure hunts” for amateurs to teach them how to better use video equipment often complicated by attachments. He creates teams of 10 people, gives them lists of things to record--for example, “someone laughing all the way to the bank”--and judges the results.

“There’s a lot of frustrated producers and directors out there who are just sick of recording the kid’s birthday party,” says Blumberg.

Yet, studies show most camcorders are used for such nostalgic moments as a first haircut, first spin on a two wheeler, baptism or bris. There are also mountains of tapes of inanimate moments: the Eiffel Tower at sunrise, Maui at sunset.

During the Persian Gulf crisis, camcorders also went to war. For the first time, broadcast journalists used the lightweight, discreet equipment in the field; the networks also handed out camcorders on the Kuwaiti border to people sneaking back during the Iraqi occupation.

As well, 450 camcorders, 350 televisions, 370 VCRs and 250,000 blank videocassettes were sent free to soldiers in Saudia Arabia as part of the “Better Than a Letter” program. The soldiers were encouraged to “write” five-minute programs and send them home. Montgomery Ward also loaned VCRs to families who didn’t have them and wanted to “read” their video mail.

Manufacturers constantly look for new niches in the home video market. News accounts say Sony first shrunk the shoulder-carried camcorders to palm-sized in the early 1980s primarily to attract a new consumer group.

In addition to new parents--who seem to think camcorders are as critical as cribs--Sony wanted to entice younger consumers to take the smaller 1.5-pound camera on vacation. And so goes the Handycam advertisement: “Something happens between the milestones. Between the weddings and the birthday parties. It’s called the rest of your life.”

Critics like Neil Postman, a professor of media ecology at New York University, believe we are numbing ourselves by recording our lives instead of actually living them: “If it wasn’t videoed, it didn’t happen? Isn’t that the way it goes?

“It’s almost as if reality itself is not satisfactory if it’s not recorded,” he says, launching into a favorite fable about two little old ladies pushing baby carriages in the park. One looks at the other’s grandchild and says, “Oooohh, he’s such a cute baby.” The other responds: “I have even cuter pictures at home.”

Postman calls the video invasion downright evil.

“You take a picture of a baby to remember what he or she looks like--that enriches life,” he says. “But do you lug around a camcorder wherever you go to confirm that you actually went some place, taking endless pictures and then never looking at them again? . . . It’s frightening. All this snooping, all of us looking at each other and ourselves. It makes you feel remote.”

But Matt York sees a different reality.

“Empowerment,” the 34-year-old publisher of Videomaker magazine says, almost dreamily. “Camcorders today are more like what paper and ink were 10 years ago, when anybody who was literate could express their spiritual or political feelings on paper. Now, people use videos to get on television. There are more and more outlets that provide more power to the individual.”

After failing to make a career in New York City as a video producer, York started publishing Videomaker in 1986 in Chico, Calif. He has 75,000 readers, he says, mostly people who own camcorders for more than a weekend hobby. The magazine focuses on the equipment and how to use it. But the most frequent features are on people who use video to help society--to teach children, illuminate the public about social ills, create art.

A recent article recounted how a consortium of peace groups became frustrated with network news coverage of the Gulf War. They solicited video opinions from groups nationwide, received 100 responses and then culled them, broadcasting four short programs on cable and PBS stations.

“Increasingly, you’ll see raw footage by an individual getting into homes of America,” says York.

Which comes back to hordes of so-called video vigilantes using their cameras as tools of communication and democracy. Or to spy on their neighbors.

At least one Tampa man thinks it’s undemocratic. He and his girlfriend were arrested last week on charges of lewd and lascivious behavior around children after a neighbor videotaped them having sex in their hot tub.

“It seems almost communistic, being arrested at your own house for having sex,” said Alfred Stephens, the man caught au natural. “It amazes me that someone had the audacity to actually videotape this.”

So what would “1984” author George Orwell think of all this now?

Big Brother is watching us and we are watching him.

But mostly we are watching each other.