8 ms·

Jennicam: The first woman to stream her life on the internet (2016)

135 points by wallflower 7y ago

rahuldottech 7y ago
Reply All did a great episode on this too: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/8whoja https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/8whoja Supplementary article: https://web.archive.org/web/20190202103231/http://gimletprod.staging.wpengine.com/6-things-i-couldnt-include-in-reply-all-episode-5/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190202103231/http://gimletprod...
ct0 7y ago
Interesting documentary of a few others living on the web at the same time, with a huge budget. This film sticks with me. We live in public. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0498329/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0498329/
- m-i-l 7y ago
  There was a throwaway line in that film that stuck with me - something along the lines of "at that time anyone who could configure a modem could make a million dollars".
larnmar 7y ago
I remember Jennicam. It wasn’t porn, but people watched it in the hope that some day porn might break out. 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.
- jandrese 7y ago
  I remember a parody account where a girl livestreamed her life from a camera shoved down her pants. Of course the screen was dark the entire time. Edit: A remnant of the site still exists! http://www.monzy.org/pantscam/ http://www.monzy.org/pantscam/
- jedberg 7y ago
  If you watched late at night it was porn any time her boyfriend stayed over. She definitely had sex live on the cam.
  - op00to 7y ago
    I am pretty sure I remember tuning in and seeing sex multiple times. Maybe I misremember...
  - taneq 7y ago
    Playing semantics here, but is that porn? You could argue it wasn't made with prurient intent.
    - neonate 7y ago
      It was watched with it, though.
      - taneq 7y ago
        No matter what the thing is, someone, somewhere, gets off on it. It's like a reverse Rule 34. (Is there already a rule saying "whatever it is, it's porn for someone"?)
    - vorpalhex 7y ago
      A true movie of life could never be made - it'd be too obscene to get published...
    - jbc1 7y ago
      wiki is saying she did stripteases for the camera. 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.
- core-questions 7y ago
  Not proud of the fact that I know this, but a certain Hitachi-manufactured appliance made an appearance a few times. Ahh, the 90s, when a 180x180 pixel badly focused image at 1 fps was all it took
  - jedberg 7y ago
    Was it even 1 FPS? I seem to recall it only took a picture once every few seconds. She clearly missed out on some product placement opportunities.
    - girvo 7y ago
      It was definitely every few seconds, as 12 year old me remembers!
hombre_fatal 7y ago
What's interesting is that, afaict, there doesn't seem to be any archive of her videos. She managed to go all the way to one extreme of livestreaming her life and then to the other extreme of total privacy, taking her videos along with her. 1996-2003 was probably the only opportunity to hit that balance. 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.
- jedberg 7y ago
  You bring up a really good point. 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.
  - tpmx 7y ago
    I'm pretty sure people archived her jpegs. I think they were just polite enough not share them publicly, in case that would embarass her. That was kind of the thinking back then, as I recall it. This was like 7-8 years before Facebook, remember?
- CharlesColeman 7y ago
  > 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. 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-story.html 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/voyeur-eyes-only 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/ 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.
kotrunga 7y ago
Is anyone else doing this now? Streaming their life 24/7?
- 01CGAT 7y ago
  Some television programs are: https://www.utopiatv.nl/live https://www.utopiatv.nl/live
- Sendotsh 7y ago
  Closest thing would probably be the IRL streamers on Twitch. There's been a few who got pretty big just streaming their lives day to day.
  - cpeterso 7y ago
    Twitch was originally Justin.tv, just a live stream of founder Justin Kan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin.tv https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin.tv
- gerbilly 7y ago
  You could say that we're all doing it now. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism)
Mountain_Skies 7y ago
She had pretty good design skills for the era. I know I certainly made use of some typographic concepts she used.
rglover 7y ago
Semi-related and possibly of interest: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1217389_we_live_in_public https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1217389_we_live_in_public
noneeeed 7y ago
Well now I feel old... I'm having flashbacks to reading .net magazine and my (dead tree) index of the web.
- oneeyedpigeon 7y ago
  You reminded me of this strange book [1] I own from ~ 1996. It's a fascinating slice of history, both culturally and technologically. Of course, it's pre- many of today's biggest sites, but interesting to see IMDB make an appearance, albeit at a much more obscure URL. [1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/186448280X/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i0 https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/186448280X/ref=dbs_a_def...
at_a_remove 7y ago
I knew her pre-Jennicam, from IRC. This was before JPEG was really "out." She sent me either a .bmp or a .gif of her left (I think) calf, using a device she called a "digital camera." At the time I had been working on making an incredibly primitive (and slow) scanner using an XY plotter, a light pen, and a data acquisition board, so it dovetailed with my little project. 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.
- glouwbug 7y ago
  ...What am I reading?
  - t34543 7y ago
    A first person account of what Jenni’s mental state was on the early days of the internet. Presumably this sets a frame for her motivations to live stream her life later.
    - pankajdoharey 7y ago
      I have never understood why would people want to broadcast their personal lives on the internet. I guess the notion of privacy is different for everyone.
      - schoen 7y ago
        You can see from Wikipedia that after Jenni finished this experiment, she significantly changed her habits in a privacy-protective direction and now has virtually no public persona. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Ringley#After_JenniCam 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.
dang 7y ago
Two related threads from 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9374397 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9374397 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9379432 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9379432
dredmorbius 7y ago
There are a number of people who'd been highly and publicly visible online during the 1990s who similarly largely dropped from view. I'm thinking of a Bay Area newspaper columnist, now doing the corporate life, or a fairly notable and outspoken hacktivist, who ... I find checking now died in 2013 of cancer (https://lancasteronline.com/obituaries/jonathan-b-stigelman/article_a3bc8a5b-3bca-5273-94ea-e96471e92b26.html https://lancasteronline.com/obituaries/jonathan-b-stigelman/...). 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-american-family-1202660360/ 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
- joe_the_user 7y ago
  I'm from that period, a programmer even, but not clued in enough to know of people like Jenni (I did meet Captain Crunch once however). 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).
  - HeyLaughingBoy 7y ago
    That something is inevitable doesn't mean it's not life-changing. A coast-to-coast road network was inevitable once the automobile was a "thing" but you can hardly claim that it wasn't life changing.
mirimir 7y ago
Huh. I don't recall Jennifer. 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] 0) http://lovolution.net/ http://lovolution.net/
throw25519 7y ago
The webcam image used to be available at http://jennicam.simplenet.com/livecam/cam.jpg http://jennicam.simplenet.com/livecam/cam.jpg 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.
laurieg 7y ago
If you want to learn more about Jennicam listen to the second act of this episode of This American Life from 2006: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/312/how-we-talked-back-then 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.
Jemm 7y ago
I was part of the team that used an eyeball cam to simulcast web images with a radio station. The radio station interviewed artists like Bush and Marilyn Manson, and we put live slow scan images on our website. We had never heard of this being done before.

135 points by wallflower 7y ago

Reply All did a great episode on this too: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/8whoja https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/8whoja Supplementary article: https://web.archive.org/web/20190202103231/http://gimletprod.staging.wpengine.com/6-things-i-couldnt-include-in-reply-all-episode-5/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190202103231/http://gimletprod...

ct0 7y ago

Interesting documentary of a few others living on the web at the same time, with a huge budget. This film sticks with me. We live in public. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0498329/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0498329/

m-i-l 7y ago
There was a throwaway line in that film that stuck with me - something along the lines of "at that time anyone who could configure a modem could make a million dollars".

larnmar 7y ago

I remember Jennicam. It wasn’t porn, but people watched it in the hope that some day porn might break out. 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.

jandrese 7y ago
I remember a parody account where a girl livestreamed her life from a camera shoved down her pants. Of course the screen was dark the entire time. Edit: A remnant of the site still exists! http://www.monzy.org/pantscam/ http://www.monzy.org/pantscam/
jedberg 7y ago
If you watched late at night it was porn any time her boyfriend stayed over. She definitely had sex live on the cam.
- op00to 7y ago
  I am pretty sure I remember tuning in and seeing sex multiple times. Maybe I misremember...
- taneq 7y ago
  Playing semantics here, but is that porn? You could argue it wasn't made with prurient intent.
  - neonate 7y ago
    It was watched with it, though.
    - taneq 7y ago
      No matter what the thing is, someone, somewhere, gets off on it. It's like a reverse Rule 34. (Is there already a rule saying "whatever it is, it's porn for someone"?)
  - vorpalhex 7y ago
    A true movie of life could never be made - it'd be too obscene to get published...
  - jbc1 7y ago
    wiki is saying she did stripteases for the camera. 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.
core-questions 7y ago
Not proud of the fact that I know this, but a certain Hitachi-manufactured appliance made an appearance a few times. Ahh, the 90s, when a 180x180 pixel badly focused image at 1 fps was all it took
- jedberg 7y ago
  Was it even 1 FPS? I seem to recall it only took a picture once every few seconds. She clearly missed out on some product placement opportunities.
  - girvo 7y ago
    It was definitely every few seconds, as 12 year old me remembers!

hombre_fatal 7y ago

What's interesting is that, afaict, there doesn't seem to be any archive of her videos. She managed to go all the way to one extreme of livestreaming her life and then to the other extreme of total privacy, taking her videos along with her. 1996-2003 was probably the only opportunity to hit that balance. 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.

jedberg 7y ago
You bring up a really good point. 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.
- tpmx 7y ago
  I'm pretty sure people archived her jpegs. I think they were just polite enough not share them publicly, in case that would embarass her. That was kind of the thinking back then, as I recall it. This was like 7-8 years before Facebook, remember?
CharlesColeman 7y ago
> 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. 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-story.html 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/voyeur-eyes-only 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/ 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.

kotrunga 7y ago

Is anyone else doing this now? Streaming their life 24/7?

01CGAT 7y ago
Some television programs are: https://www.utopiatv.nl/live https://www.utopiatv.nl/live
Sendotsh 7y ago
Closest thing would probably be the IRL streamers on Twitch. There's been a few who got pretty big just streaming their lives day to day.
- cpeterso 7y ago
  Twitch was originally Justin.tv, just a live stream of founder Justin Kan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin.tv https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin.tv
gerbilly 7y ago
You could say that we're all doing it now. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism)

Mountain_Skies 7y ago

She had pretty good design skills for the era. I know I certainly made use of some typographic concepts she used.

rglover 7y ago

Semi-related and possibly of interest: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1217389_we_live_in_public https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1217389_we_live_in_public

noneeeed 7y ago

Well now I feel old... I'm having flashbacks to reading .net magazine and my (dead tree) index of the web.

oneeyedpigeon 7y ago
You reminded me of this strange book [1] I own from ~ 1996. It's a fascinating slice of history, both culturally and technologically. Of course, it's pre- many of today's biggest sites, but interesting to see IMDB make an appearance, albeit at a much more obscure URL. [1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/186448280X/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i0 https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/186448280X/ref=dbs_a_def...

at_a_remove 7y ago

I knew her pre-Jennicam, from IRC. This was before JPEG was really "out." She sent me either a .bmp or a .gif of her left (I think) calf, using a device she called a "digital camera." At the time I had been working on making an incredibly primitive (and slow) scanner using an XY plotter, a light pen, and a data acquisition board, so it dovetailed with my little project. 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.

glouwbug 7y ago
...What am I reading?
- t34543 7y ago
  A first person account of what Jenni’s mental state was on the early days of the internet. Presumably this sets a frame for her motivations to live stream her life later.
  - pankajdoharey 7y ago
    I have never understood why would people want to broadcast their personal lives on the internet. I guess the notion of privacy is different for everyone.
    - schoen 7y ago
      You can see from Wikipedia that after Jenni finished this experiment, she significantly changed her habits in a privacy-protective direction and now has virtually no public persona. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Ringley#After_JenniCam 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.

dang 7y ago

Two related threads from 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9374397 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9374397 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9379432 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9379432

dredmorbius 7y ago

There are a number of people who'd been highly and publicly visible online during the 1990s who similarly largely dropped from view. I'm thinking of a Bay Area newspaper columnist, now doing the corporate life, or a fairly notable and outspoken hacktivist, who ... I find checking now died in 2013 of cancer (https://lancasteronline.com/obituaries/jonathan-b-stigelman/article_a3bc8a5b-3bca-5273-94ea-e96471e92b26.html https://lancasteronline.com/obituaries/jonathan-b-stigelman/...). 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-american-family-1202660360/ 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

joe_the_user 7y ago
I'm from that period, a programmer even, but not clued in enough to know of people like Jenni (I did meet Captain Crunch once however). 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).
- HeyLaughingBoy 7y ago
  That something is inevitable doesn't mean it's not life-changing. A coast-to-coast road network was inevitable once the automobile was a "thing" but you can hardly claim that it wasn't life changing.

mirimir 7y ago

Huh. I don't recall Jennifer. 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] 0) http://lovolution.net/ http://lovolution.net/

throw25519 7y ago

The webcam image used to be available at http://jennicam.simplenet.com/livecam/cam.jpg http://jennicam.simplenet.com/livecam/cam.jpg 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.

laurieg 7y ago

If you want to learn more about Jennicam listen to the second act of this episode of This American Life from 2006: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/312/how-we-talked-back-then 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.

Jemm 7y ago

I was part of the team that used an eyeball cam to simulcast web images with a radio station. The radio station interviewed artists like Bush and Marilyn Manson, and we put live slow scan images on our website. We had never heard of this being done before.