Jennifer Ringley
| Jennifer Ringley | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Jennifer Kaye Ringley August 10, 1976 Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Years active | 1996–2003 |
| Known for |
JenniCam Lifecasting |
| Website | http://replay.web.archive.org/*/http://www.jennicam.org/ |
Jennifer Kaye Ringley (born August 10, 1976) is an Internet personality and former lifecaster. She is known for creating the popular website JenniCam. Previously, live webcams transmitted static shots from cameras aimed through windows or at coffee pots. Ringley's innovation was simply to allow others to view her daily activities. She was the first web-based "lifecaster". In June 2008, CNET hailed JenniCam as one of the greatest defunct websites in history.
Regarded by some as a conceptual artist, Ringley viewed her site as a straightforward document of her life. She did not wish to filter the events that were shown on her camera, so sometimes she was shown nude or engaging in sexual behavior, including sexual intercourse and masturbation. This was a new use of Internet technology in 1996 and some viewers were interested in its sociological implications while others watched it for sexual arousal. The JenniCam website coincided with a rise in surveillance as a feature of popular culture, exemplified by the 1998 film The Truman Show and reality television programs such as Big Brother, and as a feature of contemporary art and new media art. From a sociological point of view, JenniCam was an important early example of how the internet could create a cyborg subject by integrating human images with the internet. As such, JenniCam set the stage for conversations regarding the relationship of technology and gender.
Ringley's desire to maintain the purity of the cam-eye view of her life eventually created the need to establish that she was within her rights as an adult to broadcast such information, in the legal sense, and that it was not harmful to other adults. Unlike later for-profit webcam services, Ringley did not spend her day displaying her naked body, and she spent much more time discussing her romantic life than she did her sex life. Ringley maintained her webcam site for seven years and eight months.
Sources stated that JenniCam received over 100 million visitors weekly. Nate Lanxon of CNET said "remember this is 1996 and the Web as we know it now had barely lost its virginity, let alone given birth to the God-child we know as the modern Internet."
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