Published on: 11/6/2008 Last Visited: 11/6/2008
a. Jenni Ringley - JenniCAM
In April 1996, during her junior year at Dickinson College, the 19-year-old Ringley installed a webcam in her college dorm room, and provided images from that cam on a webpage.
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From 1996 to 2003 viewers around the world could tune in 24/7 to see updated pictures of Jenni Ringley cleaning the kitchen, to taking a nap for 15.99 a year. Jenni closed down the site in 2003 due to PayPal's pornography rules.
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JenniCam (or JenniCAM), subtitled life, online, was a popular website from April 1996 until the end of 2003. Several webcams allowed users to observe the life of a young woman, Jennifer Kaye Ringley (born August 10, 1976 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania).
Previously, live webcams transmitted static shots from cameras aimed through windows or at coffee pots. Ringley's innovation was simply to allow others to view her daily activities, yet in so doing, she redefined the nature of privacy. Her pioneering efforts paved the way for later lifecasters such as Justin Kan, Justine Ezarik, Sarah Meyers and Justin Shattuck.
Concept
Regarded by some as a conceptual artist, Ringley viewed her site as a straight-forward document of her life. She did not wish to filter the events that were shown on her camera, so sometimes she was shown nude or engaging in sexual behavior, including sexual intercourse and masturbation. This was a new use of Internet technology in 1996 and viewers were stimulated both for its sociological implications and for sexual arousal. Surveillance became conceptual art, as noted by Mark Tribe in "New Media Art":
In Web sites like JenniCAM, in which a young woman installed Web cameras in her home to expose her everyday actions to online viewers...surveillance became a source of voyeuristic and exhibitionistic excitement... Institutional surveillance and the invasion of privacy have been widely explored by New Media artists."
Ringley had been raised in a naturist family and had no shyness about her body. Her nudity on cam was natural but not a product of a nudist background. Even Jennifer admitted that what she did had very little in relation to nudism. Her genuine desires to maintain the purity of the cam-eye view of her life eventually created the need to establish that she was within her rights as an adult to broadcast such information, in the legal sense, and that it was not harmful to other adults. Unlike later for-profit webcam services, Ringley did not spend her day displaying her private parts, and she spent much more time discussing her romantic life than she did her sex life. Ringley maintained her webcam site for seven years.
Origins
In April 1996, during her junior year at Dickinson College, the 19-year-old Ringley installed a webcam in her college dorm room, and provided images from that cam on a webpage. The webpage would automatically refresh every three minutes with the most recent picture from the camera. Anyone with Internet access could observe the often mundane events of Ringley's life. JenniCam was one of the first web sites that continuously and voluntarily surveyed a private life. Her first webcam contained only black-and-white images of her in the dorm room.
At times during the first couple years of JenniCam, Ringley performed strip teases for the webcam. This continued until an incident occurred wherein she received an email demanding that she do a "show." After she refused, JenniCam was hacked, and Ringley received death threats. The hackers turned out to be teen pranksters , but Ringley did no more stripteases after that.
Initially, the camera tended to be turned off during especially private moments, but eventually this custom was abandoned, and images were captured of Ringley engaging in sex. With all details of Ringley's life on display, this was one of the first opportunities, in any medium, ever to legally observe the ordinary human sexual behavior of a complete stranger.
Washington D.C.
When Ringley moved to Washington, D.C. in 1998, she added webcams to cover the additional living space (four webcams captured images of her life). She began charging for access to her site, allowing both paid and free access with the paid access updating the images more frequently than the free access. She added more pages to her website that included pictures of her cats and ferrets. Her site was doing well as she stayed home and claimed her profession to be a "web designer" for her site.
As Ringley attracted a following both on and off the Internet, more than 100 media outlets from The Wall Street Journal to Modern Ferret ran features. Ringley owned several ferrets and Modern Ferret featured Jenni and one of her ferrets on the front cover. Nude images of Ringley were published in Celebrity Sleuth, an adult magazine featuring major and minor celebrities. As an actress, she was cast in "Rear Windows '98," a 1998 episode of the TV series Diagnosis Murder, portraying Joannecam, a fictionalized version of herself. She also hosted her own Internet talk show on The Sync, an early webcasting network based in Laurel, Maryland.
Ringley's standard of living improved with a new larger apartment, expensive furniture and several trips to Amsterdam with her accountant, which she claimed were business trips. She also claimed that the experience improved her self image and self body image. Ringley began to take trips to visit other cam girls, including Ana Voog of Anacam.com.
At the height of her popularity, an estimated three to four million people watched JenniCam.org daily. She eventually purchased the domain jennicam.com as well. She appeared July 31, 1998 as a guest on The Late Show with David Letterman. At the end of the interview, and even after having been corrected once, Letterman plugged the site as Jennicam.net instead of the correct Jennicam.com (Ringley owned both jennicam.com and jennicam.org). People visiting the previously non-existent Jennicam.net found a pornographic site with the greeting, "Thanks Dave".
She also appeared on The Today Show, and World News Tonight With Peter Jennings.
Parody sites arose as JenniCam became more popular as well. One known one was jonnicam.com, the life of a cat who pooped in a litter box.
Sacramento
When Ringley moved to Sacramento, California, she documented the boxing of her possessions with free live streaming and full audio. In California, some fuss was made when she suddenly became involved with Dex, a man who was the fiance of a fellow webcammer and friend who helped her with her move to California.
She shut her site down on December 31, 2003, citing Paypal's new anti-nudity policy, despite the fact that there were several other methods to accept payment for the site. Some critics theorized the real reason was due to dropping subscription rates caused by less time on cam and Dex's refusal to appear on cam while having sex with Jenni.
Ringley currently works as a computer programmer in Sacramento, and intends to remain out of the public eye. "I really am enjoying my privacy now. I don't have a web page; I don't have a MySpace page. It's a completely different feeling, and I think I'm enjoying it."
Sources
Feminist Cyberscapes: Mapping Gendered Academic Spaces, Blair K., Takayoshi P., COLLEGE COMPOSITION AND COMMUNICATION, VOL 52; PART 2, pages 302-305, ISBN 1-56750-438-8
Jenni's Room: Exhibitionism and Solitude, Burgin, V., Critical Inquiry, 2000
Gender and power in online communication, Herring, S.C., The Handbook of Language and Gender, 2003
A camera with a view: JenniCAM, visual representation, and cyborg subjectivity, Jimroglou, K. M., INFORMATION COMMUNICATION AND SOCIETY, VOL 2; NUMB 4, pages 439-453, 1999
tekst.no, Schwebs, Ture & Otnes, Hildegunn, p. 175. Oslo: Cappelen. ISBN 82-02-19673-6, 2001
Design vs. Content: A Survey of Ten Popular Web Sites That Made Emotional Connections with the User, Vogler, D., Computers in Entertainment (CIE), 2005
JenniCam's So-called Life Goes Live Washington Business Journal, p. 2, January 19, 1998.
Archive.org for jennicam.org
Archive.org for jennicam.com
Archive.org for jennicam.net
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