

Patient Zero of the selfie age: Why JenniCam abandoned her digital life - JacobAldridge
http://www.news.com.au/technology/online/patient-zero-of-the-selfie-age-why-jennicam-abandoned-her-digital-life/story-fnjwnhzf-1227304870372

======
netcan
One interesting aspect of whatever this is a part of (sharing, privacy,
digital culture, take you pick) is how strong and emotionally charged people
opinions and theories are.

I think it's like asking an 18th century village dweller about urban life and
its implications. Maybe that's not the right analogy. Maybe it's like asking a
clan member about national identity or maybe it's like asking a scribe about
university life in 2015, with parties and labs and counter culture thrown into
the mix. Can you imagine walking by someone and not acknowledging that you
just walked by each other? Barely noticing to the point that if you walk by
each other tomorrow you won't remember them? What kind of people are these?
Walking by someone without acknowledging them certainly _is_ counter to human
nature. It's against how people behaved since before people where people. It's
counter to behavioral patterns we share with other primates.

What I mean is that all the "laws of nature" that make up the environment for
our lives are thrown up in the air and rearranged as the world we live in
becomes digital. How public something is, how permanent. Context. Feedback.
Norms. Rules. Consequences. Anonymity. Empathy. It all changes.

How do you feel about this? What is your perspective on privacy in the digital
world? What do you think of your boss seeing you twitter jokes? really?

How can we expect ourselves to really have a mature, realistic perspective on
this? Imagine that no one has died in 500 years. We have trillions of digital
and physical copies of ourselves that merge and reduplicate every 7 days. We
an colonize worlds by creating copies of them here and copies of us there. We
occasionally spend millennia examining fleeting moments of our lives and can
experience and re experience every sequence of moments infinitely and uniquely
each time. How do you feel about the social implications of this world. Does
John Locke still apply? Demosthenes?

Im being purposely cartoonish and over the top (can you tell?). The point I
think I'm trying to make is that looking at everything that's changing and
where we think we're headed within our lifetimes is tricky to process. It's
impossible. We can't have a clear perspective on these issues.

~~~
unwind
_Walking by someone without acknowledging them certainly is counter to human
nature._

I think that is very much a function of your local culture, not some core
"human nature". Here (Sweden) I regularly walk by people without acknowledging
them, and that's in the office. Out in public, I would probably be considered
mildly strange if I started acknowledging strangers.

~~~
netcan
If you had just come back from an overnight fishing trip and passed someone
who lived 2 miles from you in 752 AD and didn't acknowledge them, they would
probably conclude you were being possessed by some belligerent spirit. How are
gonna not acknowledge someone after spending a winter huddled together in a
barn eating salted fish and trying not to freeze to death.

If you happened across a stranger without at least thumbing your axe and
giving him a good look it would also be very strange. Stranger = Danger.
Strangers = Invasion.

The whole concept of people/strangers as a benign part of the background
probably originates with cities, or whatever the earliest dense populations
were.

What I am trying to say is that we're used to it now and its normal, but
before a certain point it would have been extremely alien. The fact that you
and some of your fiends can visit Lindisfarne without the locals heading for
the hills is the remarkable thing, from a long enough perspective.

~~~
delinka
But none of that makes it "human nature." It's still cultural.

~~~
netcan
Are we talking semantically (what is the definition of human nature?) or
something else?

IE If we find that living within a family group is how humans lived from pre-
sapiens times until recent times, does that "prove" that something is human
nature (it's how we evolved to behave), isn't human nature (we don't behave
that way now) or is that tangental (it proves nothing)?

For the purposes of the thread, I don't think it matters much if we disagree
about a technicality. I just wanted to make an analogy about the future being
very alien to inhabitants of the present to the point that the ways it will be
different and how we'll feel about that will be hard to conceive. Walking
through a group of strangers without looking up from your phone (or iStone, if
you're a caveman) would have been as weird as walking through a pack of
hyenas. Insane.

If a caveman had tried to imagine how he'd feel about that world, he'd
probably imagine feeling terrified all the time. Do you play with everyone's
kids or ignore them too. Do you have sex with everyone? What happens if you're
eating a sandwich? They wouldn't even know which questions are relevant to
imagining how they'd feel.

I'm making the case that self culture (JennicCam, Facebook, JustinTV) is the
very start of something which is so alien to us that it's hard to address in a
non ridiculous way.

------
brohoolio
Reply All, an excellent internet podcast did an episode about jennicam. Pretty
interesting stuff.

[http://gimletmedia.com/episode/5-the-
jennicam/](http://gimletmedia.com/episode/5-the-jennicam/)

~~~
speik
The episode is explicitly mentioned in the article.

Also, just curious, is there any other kind of podcast besides an internet
one?

~~~
JohnBooty
I know you're being facetious and poking fun at the redundancy of the phrase
"Internet podcast" but now you have me thinking about how cool an offline
podcast might be.

Maybe it would be distributed via physical dead drops on USB sticks, or pirate
wi-fi networks beamed from disposable drones flown by courageous freedom
fighters, or maybe it would be distributed via IP over avian carrier:
[http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149](http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149)

(In all seriousness, my very loose understanding is that in a lot of countries
without robust Internet infrastructure, music is often traded directly from
phone to phone. It's possible that podcasts or spoken-word messages are traded
this way as well...)

~~~
JonnieCache
_> my very loose understanding is that in a lot of countries without robust
Internet infrastructure, music is often traded directly from phone to phone._

You are indeed correct.

[https://sahelsounds.bandcamp.com/album/music-from-saharan-
ce...](https://sahelsounds.bandcamp.com/album/music-from-saharan-cellphones)

Africa has had a spoken-word radio radio culture for a long time AFAIK.

------
dredmorbius
I've long suspected that the oversharing life is at most a phase and/or a
personality trait. Not one widely shared.

Jenny is only one of many early online personas (of varying levels of sharing)
who's largely gone silent.

~~~
JonnieCache
Here's the classic "I'm leaving the internet, its bad for me" essay, from
1994:
[http://folksonomy.co/?permalink=2299](http://folksonomy.co/?permalink=2299)

As you can see, absolutely nothing has changed.

~~~
dredmorbius
Starting with shunning conventional capitalization....

------
blfr
Also yesterday
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9374397](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9374397)

~~~
JonnieCache
Indeed, this article is blogspam for the digg article/podcast, believe it or
not.

~~~
yitchelle
Interesting. How did you draw this conclusion? I thought the article was one
of the better ones from digg.

~~~
JonnieCache
Sorry, what I mean here is that this news article took the story from digg.
Which is something of a role reversal considering digg's past as an
aggregator.

------
Tloewald
I see no mention of Kibo, who was an early (Usenet) presence projection who
also (2005ish) eventually pretty much disappeared. I wonder if it's the fame
or the sustained effort after fame has peaked. It seems exhausting.

------
driverdan
If this interests you see the documentary We Live In Public. It's also about
early life streaming:
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0498329/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0498329/)

------
peter303
One of the first selfie guys Jeff Harris posted a daily selfie for nearly 14
years, then dropped off the face of earth. Toward the end he showed a gruesome
cancer operation, so I presume he may have passed. The web doesnt reveal his
fate.

------
cagey_vet
i remember when #hack on efnet hacked her cam feed, i dont recall laughing so
hard at antics.

