JenniCam
JenniCam was a website that was online from 1996 to 2003. A webcam observed the protagonist Jennifer Ringley in her everyday life. The use of a webcam as a substitute for a diary, known as lifecasting , was an absolute novelty in 1996. Before this, these devices had been used, for example, to film the view out of the window or to display the filling level of a coffee machine over the network.
JenniCam developed when Ringley was talking to a friend at Dickinson College about FishbowlCam , a camera that broadcast the contents of an aquarium over the Internet. Ringley came up with the idea of a human aquarium and pointed a camera at her room. She started broadcasting the pictures for a few friends, but after positive feedback, she opened the pictures to the general public. Initially, she set up a webcam on her room and took a picture every 3 minutes, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. According to Ringley, the recordings were neither staged nor edited, except for guests in the house who did not want to appear themselves. She removed their pictures.
After starting the project early in college, the camera followed Ringley's move to Washington, DC . She bought a second webcam to add to the first webcam. If the website initially consisted of still images and films, it also ran a live stream in Washington ( JenniSHOW ). Ringley filmed all aspects of her life, from times when she was sitting around alone and being bored to intimate moments with the men present. Above all, the camera shows the normal life of a woman and web designer, which mainly consisted of many phone calls, long use of the computer and many hours of uneventful sleep. When Ringley was out, the camera could just show the empty room for long periods of time.
Since Ringley also dressed and undressed in front of the camera, the accusation of pornography quickly weighed on her project. The success of JenniCam spawned hundreds of successors. Most of them worked on a similar concept - normal life, in which nudity was occasional. However, some quickly recognized the popularity of naked and half-naked women on the Internet, emphasized this side of the live cam much more and approached a softcore aesthetic. Within a few years there were several thousand offers of so-called live cams, the content of which ranged from harmless and clearly edited family entertainment to hardcore pornography.
CNet listed JenniCam as one of the greatest downed sites of all time in 2008. At times JenniCam is said to have had up to 100 million visitors a week. The success of the website brought Ringley invitations to talk shows and the image on various magazines. She appeared in the 1998 CBS crime series Diagnosis: Murder in the episode Rear Window '98 . There she played a webcam operator who is murdered in front of the camera. After starting out as a hobby, Ringley later sold memberships for $ 15 for three months. Members received a new picture every minute (as opposed to 15 minutes for non-members), had access to an archive of all previous pictures and could enter a chat. The income primarily served to cover bandwidth costs, but also enabled Ringley to live a comfortable life for a few years. In 2003 she finally broke up JenniCam because PayPal no longer accepted business partners who made money from nude photography. Ringley is married, lives in Sacramento, California, and works as a programmer.
Remarks
- ↑ a b c d e f Frederick S. Lane: Obscene profits: the entrepreneurs of pornography in the cyber age Routledge, 2000, ISBN 0415920965 , pp. 252-256
- ↑ a b c d Larry P. Gross, John Stuart Katz, Jay Ruby: Image ethics in the digital age U of Minnesota Press, 2003, ISBN 081663825X , pp. Xii – xiv
- ↑ a b CNet: The greatest defunct Web sites and dotcom disasters ( Memento June 7, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) , June 28, 2008
- ↑ Jennicam: The first woman to stream her life on the internet , BBC, October 18, 2016