JenniCam
From Academic Kids
JenniCam was a popular website with the main feature being several webcams which allowed Internet users to observe the life of a young woman, Jennifer Ringley.
During her junior year at Dickinson College, in April of 1996, Ms. 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. Anybody with Internet access could observe Ringley as she went about her daily life. JenniCam was one of the first web sites that continuously and voluntarily surveyed a private life.
Ringley states that the site was an attempt to document 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.
Ringley maintained her webcam site for seven years. After she graduated from Dickinson, the site moved with her to Washington, D.C. and later Sacramento, California. After leaving the college dorm behind, she moved to housing that consisted of more than one room, so she added webcams to cover the additional living space. Eventually, she started to charge for access to her site. At the height of her popularity, more than a million people watched JenniCam.org daily.
Aside from her net-celebrity status as the one of the first persons to use a webcam in the manner described here, she also was known for a scandal in which she had sexual intercourse with the fiance, Dex, of her friend Courtney. Ringley broadcast images of Dex's infidelity on her webcam. Courtney found out about Dex's infidelity, or cheating, by viewing the JenniCam.org website. Dex later moved in with Ringley.
The site was closed permanently on December 31, 2003. One possible reason that Ringley shut down her site was that PayPal had dropped her as their customer because her website included full-frontal nudity.
References
- Schwebs, Ture & Otnes, Hildegunn (2001). tekst.no, p. 175. Oslo: Cappelen. ISBN 82-02-19673-6
Interviews
- with Sam Esmail from esmail.com (http://www.esmail.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=13), where Jennifer reveals that she scored 1400 on the SATs
- This American Life - Tales from the Net - Episode 66 (http://www.thislife.org/pages/descriptions/97/66.html) - This episode of This American Life featured a conversation with Jennifer Ringley. The interview starts around minute 16.
External link
- BBC News Online - R.I.P. Jennicam (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3360063.stm)
- Odes to Jennicam - [1] (http://www.polyamory.org/~howard/Poetry/jennicamI01.html) Poetry about Jennicam
- Jennicam Archive -- [2] (http://www.arttech.ab.ca/pbrown/jenni/jenni.html)
