Jennicam And The Birth Of 'Lifecasting'
With the recent release of live-streaming apps Periscope and Meerkat, a waning phenomenon has enjoyed a revival — the "lifecast." You wouldn't expect this exhaustive online documentation of the mundanities of everyday life to have a Patient Zero. But it does. Her name is Jennifer Ringley, and 19 years ago today, her site, Jennicam, went live.
At one point, Jennicam was one of the most popular websites on the Internet. But in 2003, the site shut down, and Jenni disappeared from the Internet entirely. Until this interview with Reply All, Jenni had not spoken publicly in nearly 5 years.
In 1996, Jennifer Ringley — then a junior at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania — stumbled upon a new piece of technology at her college bookstore. A webcam. She brought it back to her dorm room, and quickly realized she had no idea what to do with it. So she started a website which would dynamically update with an image of her dorm room every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
"It was basically a programming challenge to myself to see if I could set up the script that would take the pictures, upload them to this site," says Ringley. "Just to get that happening automatically, and I shared it with a couple of friends, kinda 'look, I got this working.'"
What began as a programming challenge quickly became an art project. We've come to expect that when someone does something this extreme, it's the result of something extreme in their personality. But Jenni is confoundingly normal. She enjoyed the attention, sure, but she wasn't desperate for fame. She wasn't a prude, exactly, but as exhibitionists go, she was pretty mild. She wasn't in it for the money — she actually refused plenty of opportunities for banner ads or product placement. It kind of seemed like once it started, she just needed to see what would happen next. It sort became a mission, this experiment in radical openness.
Her experiment went from being seen only by her friends, to being seen by the whole world. "Somebody at a newspaper in Australia heard about it and wrote an article about it, and pretty immediately things went crazy," says Jenni. "I got a call from my ISP that I owed them several hundred dollars for bandwidth charges and I'd have to move my site. It was not something I had definitely prepared for."
Looking at Jennicam as an Internet user in 2015, it's kind of hard to see the appeal. But there was something magnetic about watching it. It was easy to sit there and stare at the screen, anticipating the next picture, another link in a chain that could be assembled into a narrative. Jenni is on her bed in thigh high boots, so she is going out. Jenni is in a tank top and sweatpants in front of her computer, so she was staying home and chatting on IRC. Jenni and a guy are laying next to one another in bed, so they will fall asleep reading, or will end up having sex. This, of course — the possibility of witnessing nudity or sex — was also a huge part of the appeal. Maybe it would happen in the next image. Or the next image. Or the next.
"The first time one boyfriend and I did started kissing, the site went down pretty much immediately from too much load," says Jenni. "And once he realizes that just kissing has overloaded the site, he didn't come back into my room again. No one wanted to be on it, nobody wanted to come into my room."
At its peak, her site got seven million hits a day. Back in the the late '90s, this meant Jenni was getting a lot of attention. There was a Jennicam IRC channel. A website dedicated just to pictures of her feet. There were articles about her in The Wall Street Journal, Salon, all over the place. She was a guest on a now quaint episode of This American Life called "Tales From the Net." She made a cameo appearance on Diagnosis Murder, a detective show starring Dick Van Dyke, as "Joannecam," a club-footed camgirl who gets a knife in the back before she's uttered a word.
She even appeared on David Letterman in 1998.
As the project progressed, Jenni acquired more cameras and upped the cam's refresh rate from every 15 minutes to every 3. This being the Internet, Jenni's success soon spawned legions of imitators — Anacam, Amandacam, Izzicam. Websites popped up that did reviews of camgirls. People were invested in Jenni's personal life in a way she could never have anticipated.
In the spring of 2000, that investment blew up in her face. Jenni had just moved to Sacramento, finding a place to live with the help of a fellow cam girl who already lived there. A few months later, Jenni slept with this cam girl's fiance. On camera, of course.
Cam forums erupted with vitriol. And the outrage wasn't confined to the Internet. The Washington Post which called her a "red-headed little minx" and an "amoral man trapper." You read that right. The Washington Post. Jenni and the former fiance moved in together. As you can probably imagine, her new relationship didn't flourish under that kind of scrutiny.
"I think what really bit the most is when that relationship did start failing, which was almost as soon as anybody could have predicted," says Jenni. "I do think I ended up staying in that relationship for a lot longer than I would have because — I really really went out of my way to make this happen so I'm not just going to give up. So I definitely thought there was more of a weight of responsibility on me to try harder just because I had apparently made a huge mistake."
Eventually, viewer interest in the site began to wane, and in late 2003, Jenni announced that she was shutting it down. On December 31st, Jennicam went dark. She backed up her images and journal entries to some zipdisks, and threw all of it, the cameras, the backups, everything that had to do with Jennicam, in a box that lives somewhere in her garage now.
After the site went down, Jenni went cold turkey, retreating from the Internet entirely. She has no Facebook, no website, no real Internet presence to speak of. She started a website for her clan in Clash of Clans, but no one knows who she is on there. No one knows that she is Jennicam. She has thrown herself wholly into anonymity.
"My husband's last name is Johnson and Jennifer Johnson is practically better than Jane Doe," says Jenni. "I was super eager to take his last name. Super eager."
But while she was retreating from the Internet, designers were incorporating the lessons of Jennicam into everything we use today. While Jenni's original setup in 1996 required a web-cam and some programming know-how, all you need to live-stream constantly today is a smartphone and an unlimited data plan.
In 2014, Anil Dash tweeted this:
In some ways, Dash's tweet is true. We're Tweeting and Facebooking and Periscoping more of our lives than ever before. But all of these media give us the opportunity to tailor our online presence. To only portray the best, sexiest, smartest moments. Jenni showed us everything. The good, the bad, the exciting, the mundane. She gave control of her online life over to the public and the technology that broadcast it. It was adventurous in a way that even the most public facing lifecaster these days would not dare to be.
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