Jennicam: The first woman to stream her life on the internet (2016)
bbc.com
bbc.com
She was interested in disintermediation. She could take an image and send it directly to someone without it being taken to a darkroom, without it being published and distributed, and so forth. This is common now but it was ... really startling back around 1991 or 1992. No later than that, given my timeframes.
An image of a hand may have also been sent. She could just ... send me random local images. Given that my home setup was a simple terminal, I had to go to campus to look at the images on a workstation but it was still from there to here without anyone else being in the middle of it.
My memory of decades old conversations are rather dim, but it wasn't about exhibition for her, rather it was direct access, without filters or someone else trying to decide "what is worth publishing." Her willingness to explore this new territory was very impressive to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Ringley#After_JenniCa...
I tried some experiments around 1998 with a script on my web page where I would self-report my location to the public (aspirationally on an hourly basis, but in practice probably less than once a day). I admit that at that time I had an argument with a friend about whether location privacy was worth worrying about. My answer nowadays is definitely yes, but I also still appreciate the difference between intentionally sharing information about yourself (including "oversharing") and having someone else monitor you, your whereabouts, your communications, etc.
One difference is that in the former case, if you decide you have an adversary of some sort, you can stop sharing (or reduce your sharing, or make it less accurate). In the latter case, you can't make these changes so readily.
As soon as Jenni wanted to stop sharing, she stopped.
I'd include color photos in my school reports. Teachers stared open-mouthed at them. It was like having a superpower.
As I recall it was take-home hardware used by a Boeing employee (and his family...).
To this day I remember the address of a woman who was so proud that she finally figured how to use it to digitize a photo of her daughter that she printed it out and mailed it to me as thanks for my help :-)
One of my pleasures was finding someone whose Usenet post from 1995 I had saved on a computer and then backed up repeatedly over the years. The post was about a machine he built to automate letting his cat out and I recalled it instantly (even knew the filename I had it saved to) because his recounting of what happened was so hilarious. I sent him the file and the really weird thing was he had no recollection of the events. He was sure it was something he would have done, but really couldn't remember.
I'm actually surprised that I've only come across one other person I "knew" from Usenet here on HN.
Then you can set up Thunderbird, Claws Mail or another email app (even slrn or alpine on the linux command line) to read and respond to newsgroups.
Hard to imagine a popular Twitch streamer disappearing along with all their videos in 2019. Then again, not knowing anything about Jennicam while she was online, I reckon any popular Twitch streamer has at least 100x the audience that Jennifer had.
Her cam was hosted on her own website on her own server, so no 3rd party was involved.
No one really thought about archiving such things back then.
Heck, even she probably doesn’t have an archive because it would have been cost prohibitive.
IIRC, she got a lot of media coverage at the time due to the novelty of what she was doing, e.g.:
1997: Jenni, Jenni, Jenni: A Life Laid Bare on the Computer Screen: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-oct-01-ls-37894...
1997: Voyeur Eyes Only: Jennifer Ringley's real-time web of life: https://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/news/article/13013765/vo...
1999: 'Ed' of the Internet: JenniCAM going strong after three years: http://edition.cnn.com/SHOWBIZ/Movies/9903/26/jennicam/
Her audience probably was smaller than many streamers, but my guess is she was more well known across a broader slice of the public than any streamer.
When we get good fake videos the only way to tell what is or isn't real will be what's on authenticated accounts. i.e You know that a certain video is legitimate only because it's posted on an account you trust. When your trusted account pulls their content, you'll only have your memories to differentiate between real records and illegitimate fakes.
A person who is intent on recovering their privacy could, after taking their account private, start a disinformation campaign where they post fake videos of their own content. They could add, delete, and modify bits of their own content making it impossible for future viewers to know whether they were seeing something real or fake. I imagine that with enough effort you could even get people to forget, or incorrectly remember, what you looked like.
Given that she went offline.
But on the other hand, her cam was public, so it's arguably nothing like revenge porn.
Supplementary article: https://web.archive.org/web/20190202103231/http://gimletprod...
This was before reality television (though there'd been precursors such as "An American Family", featuring the Louds of Santa Barbara, CA, in 1973: https://variety.com/2018/vintage/features/reality-tv-an-amer...), before Facebook, or MySpace (2004), or Friendster (2003), though Geocities (1994) did exist.
Internet access was via dialup. I recall trading in my 28.8k modem for a 56k during this period. Linux was pretty extreme fringe, Windows NT 4.0 hadn't been released yet, and getting a TCP/IP stack on Windows 3.11, or if you were advanced, Windows 95, required Winsock32.dll.
Apple was still Apple Computer, and its CEO was Gil Amelio. Mobile phones were a rarity. Digital cameras, as of 1999 - 2000, were extremely expensive and rare, and high-end professional equipment might boast 5-8 megapixels. Web search was Altavista, HotBot, AskJeves, or Yahoo. Google only emerged ~1998-1999.
Displays were still CRTs, chips were still Pentium or Pentium-Pro, unless you were using a Mac, in which case, PowerPC.
This was a quarter century ago. I am now old.
The times were, it shocks me to
The thing is that it's hard to see someone like this fundamentally changing the world. Not everything is inevitable but live-stream everything seems inevitable. Basically, breaking all barrier to knowledge of others seems inevitable and by that token, one level of invasiveness is going to replace another as the first level is forgotten (except by lagging consumers of whatever sort).
I disagree that live-streaming everything is inevitable, in the sense that everyone will do it, under their legal or everyday identity, and a point of my upstream comment was that it seems more a phase, often (though not always) associated with youth, that people go through.
In the case of Ringley, she is "almost wholly absent from the Internet now" (2016), and in 2007: "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."
As with much else that mainstream media seems to treat as generational, the truth seems to be rather more that many behaviours tend to follow individual's life-cycles, with a few exceptions. Individual mental health can also play a role, and I believe Ringley and/or her partner had issues with depression or other conditions as well.
(Conditions themselves which appear to be far more widespread among contemporary youth than those of decades past, an exception to the rule I'd just given above, but comparable to, say, the "lost generation" following WWI in Europe.)
I read an obituary for him when he died, but I haven't been able to find it -- first I thought it was here on HN, but it doesn't show up when searching. Maybe it was on a Linux user group mailing list?
Looking back, anyone could have predicted that live streaming technology would eventually be used for porn, but what really surprised me was that the actual killer app of live streaming turned out to be watching people play video games.
Edit: A remnant of the site still exists!
She originally gave access to the stream for free and then later started charging for it. She also originally blocked it during sex but then stopped. Makes me think she had a "people will pay to see me bang" motivation.
She clearly missed out on some product placement opportunities.
This would likely be 1996, perhaps before jennicam.org.
I wrote a web scraper in C to archive it when modified. I still have the scraper code, but I think any images are long gone.
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/312/how-we-talked-back-then
The episode is from 2006 but has an interview from the 90's with the Jennifer of Jennicam. It's fun to hear how we talk about the internet now and how people were talking about the internet in the 1990's.
We had never heard of this being done before.
I'm having flashbacks to reading .net magazine and my (dead tree) index of the web.
[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/186448280X/ref=dbs_a_def...
But I do recall the cam streaming thing. For a while, a distant girlfriend and I streamed each other. But, as far as I know, it was totally private.
And now I'm reminded of Doctress Neutopia aka Libby Hubbard.[0]