JenniCam

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A glimpse of Jenni, January 9, 1999.
A glimpse of Jenni, January 9, 1999.

JenniCam (or JenniCAM) was a popular website whose main feature was several webcams that allowed Internet users to observe the life of a young woman, Jennifer Kaye Ringley (born August 10, 1976).[1] The site was online from April 1996 until the end of 2003. It was among the first such cameras on the web to challenge such social norms as the privacy of the home and explore the boundaries between non-criminal exhibitionism and commercial pornography.

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[edit] General description

Ringley states that the site was an attempt to document her life.[2] 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 intercourse in the context of a stable heterosexual relationship 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.[3]

Ringley had been raised in a nudist/naturist family and had no shyness about her body but she also established that she was within her rights as an adult to broadcast such information at that, at least in the legal sense, it was not harmful to other adults as she was never prosecuted for her broadcasts. Unlike more recent for-profit webcam services, Ringley did not spend her day displaying her private parts, and she spent much more time discussing her romance life than she did her sex life.[4][5]

Ringley maintained her webcam site for seven years.[6]

[edit] Origins

In April of 1996, at age 19 during her junior year at Dickinson College, Ringley installed a webcam in her college dorm room, and provided images from that cam on a webpage.[7] The webpage would automatically refresh every three minutes with the most recent picture from the camera. Anyone 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. 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.[8] This continued until an incident occurred wherein she received an email demanding that she do a "show," and after she refused, JenniCam was hacked and Ringley received death threats.[9] The hackers turned out to be teen pranksters[10], 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 sexual intercourse, including oral and vaginal sex. It was not billed, however, as a pornography site and indeed it was not, because rather than showing staged sex acts for purely commercial benefit, it showed all details of Ringley's life. It was therefore one of the first opportunities, in any medium, ever to legally observe the ordinary human sexual behavior of a complete stranger.

[edit] Washington D.C.

Ringley moved to Washington, D.C. in 1998. She added webcams to cover the additional living space (four webcams captured images of her life). Eventually, she started to charge 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.[10]

Ringley attracted a following both on and off the Internet. Ringley owned several ferrets and "Ferret Magazine" featured Jenni and one of her ferrets on the cover of their magazine. Years later, Ringley appeared topless and even nude in "Celebrity Sleuth," an adult magazine featuring minor celebrities. Jenni also appeared in an episode of the television show Diagnosis Murder, playing 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.[11]

Ringley began to take trips to visit other cam girls, including Ana Voog of Anacam.com.

The bedroom on March 18, 1999.
The bedroom on March 18, 1999.

At the height of her popularity, an estimated three to four million people watched JenniCam.org daily. Jenni eventually purchased the domain jennicam.com as well.

Ringley appeared on 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 porn site with the greeting, "Thanks Dave".

She also appeared on The Today Show, and World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.[12]

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.

[edit] Sacramento

Ringley later moved to Sacramento, California. Some fuss was made when she suddenly became involved with a man who had been involved in a stable relationship with a common friend.[13]

She shut her site down on December 31, 2003, citing Paypal's new anti-nudity policy.[14][15][16][17][18][19][20]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Jennifer Ringley
  2. ^ Commentary: JenniCam
  3. ^ Jenni brought a little humanity into a wired worldDecember 30, 2003
  4. ^ Jenni's in loveAugust 08, 2000
  5. ^ 21st: Live! From my bedroomJanuary 08, 1998
  6. ^ JenniCam Closing After 7+ YearsDecember 05, 2003
  7. ^ Jennifer Ringley doesn't live here anymore ...
  8. ^ The Story of the EyeSeptember 09, 1997
  9. ^ Jennifer Kaye Ringley
  10. ^ a b 'Ed' of the Internet: JenniCAM going strong after three yearsMarch 26, 1999
  11. ^ Jennifer Ringley is her own paparazziSeptember 17, 1997(?)
  12. ^ Webcasters Coalition for Free SpeechSeptemmber 21, 1999
  13. ^ Little Jenni Homewrecker: Web vixen gets shot by her own camJuly 27, 2000
  14. ^ Curtains in the bedroom -- JenniCam switches offDecember 12, 2003
  15. ^ R.I.P. JenniCamJanuary 1, 2004
  16. ^ Forgotten Web Celebrities: Jennicam.org's Jennifer RingleyMay 19, 2004
  17. ^ Good-bye, JenniCam ...December 12, 2003
  18. ^ Voyeur Web site JenniCam to go darkDecember 10, 2003
  19. ^ Reg seeks poetic JenniCam memorialDecember 10, 2003
  20. ^ Jenni’s FootnoteDecember 11, 2003
  • 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

[edit] Interviews

[edit] External links

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