
Jennicam: The first woman to stream her life on the internet (2016) - wallflower
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-37681006
======
at_a_remove
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.

~~~
code_duck
Around 91-92 I had DigiView for my Amiga. This was a hardware add-on that
could digitize any still images from a video source (RCA plug), whether from a
live camcorder or a tape. It created a digital image that could be manipulated
on the Amiga. It could even create a color image with the help of three
filters, a la early photography. I didn't have any sort of network
connectivity, though.

~~~
noonespecial
I had it too on my Amiga. Same time about. My father also had one of the first
color inkjets from work that mostly stayed at our house.

I'd include color photos in my school reports. Teachers stared open-mouthed at
them. It was like having a superpower.

~~~
themodelplumber
Funny! You made me remember some friends who did that. And I still recall some
of the replies from people like drama teachers, wondering exactly how much
advanced hardware, and at what kind of prices, contributed to the design of a
homework report on a short film we had watched in class. Incorporating images
from the early WWW, or was it Encarta.

As I recall it was take-home hardware used by a Boeing employee (and his
family...).

------
hombre_fatal
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.

~~~
xeeeeeeeeeeenu
Maybe there are no videos but there's a gallery of (very) NSFW screencaps from
her streams: [https://xhamster.com/photos/gallery/old-school-
jennicam-1183...](https://xhamster.com/photos/gallery/old-school-
jennicam-11836354)

~~~
_vertigo
I don't think this belongs here.

~~~
drdeadringer
Why? It is on topic.

~~~
pjc50
It's NSFW and this website is very widely read at work.

~~~
drdeadringer
While that's fair, I must point out that the link offered is noted as NSFW.
Perhaps you wait to click on it when it's after hours.

------
rahuldottech
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...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190202103231/http://gimletprod.staging.wpengine.com/6-things-
i-couldnt-include-in-reply-all-episode-5/)

------
dredmorbius
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/...](https://lancasteronline.com/obituaries/jonathan-b-
stigelman/article_a3bc8a5b-3bca-5273-94ea-e96471e92b26.html)).

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...](https://variety.com/2018/vintage/features/reality-tv-an-american-
family-1202660360/)), 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
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).

~~~
dredmorbius
I'd met Draper myself. Quite the character. Almost a phreak ....

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.)

------
larnmar
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.

~~~
jedberg
If you watched late at night it was porn any time her boyfriend stayed over.
She definitely had sex live on the cam.

~~~
taneq
Playing semantics here, but is that porn? You could argue it wasn't made with
prurient intent.

~~~
neonate
It was watched with it, though.

~~~
taneq
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"?)

------
ct0
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
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".

------
throw25519
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.

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

------
rglover
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)

------
dang
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)

------
laurieg
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
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.

------
noneeeed
Well now I feel old...

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

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
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...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/186448280X/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i0)

------
mirimir
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/)

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

~~~
Sendotsh
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
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)

