About seven or eight years ago a college student bought an inexpensive web-cam and set it up in her dorm room. The camera was set to record a picture every 5 minutes or so and post them on her website jennicam.org. it wasn’t that she was an exhibitionist or one of those porn video chat people, she was experimenting with the idea of a human zoo environment where people could observe the exhibit (herself) in a natural environment.
She didn’t play to the camera, staging elaborate parties to make it seem like her life was fuller than it was or putting up expensive things in view of the camera while the rest of the room was shabby, she simply lived her life with the camera watching. As she put it on her disclaimer “it’s not that I want to be watched, it’s just that I don’t mind it.”
7+ years later she has moved a few times, had a few relationships, had a small menagerie of animals pass through her life and has held three or four Jenni-Con’s where some of her friends and members can come and hang out for a weekend in her apartment. The site expanded from the single camera feed in the dorm room to several cameras on motion sensors scattered around her apartment so that if she went to another room the cameras would automatically detect it and would continue the feed from there. She also set up a sporadically updated video post show on The Sync website (home of Snackboy and other video creatures).
When the movies The Truman Show and Ed TV came out, Jenni made the talk show circuit and discussed what it was like for a real person living with the public eye on them, literally 24 hours a day. She was also interviewed by press from various countries on the same topic.
For me JenniCam was just a neat website to look in on occasionally at college but sometimes when I had to write a paper long into the night I would turn on the remote window feature and would keep a little box on the corner of the screen and would glance down occasionally and see what she was doing (lots of coding in those days). Eventually I finished college and moved away but still found myself returning to her site just to see what she was doing.
I found out recently that JenniCam is closing down on December 31, 2003. Goodbye JenniCam and thank you Jennifer Ringley for giving us something interesting to watch without a laugh track or embellishments. This was reality programming at it’s best.