JenniCam was a popular website whose main feature was several webcams that allowed Internet users to observe the life of a young woman, Jennifer Ringley. In April of 1996, during her junior year at Dickinson College, Ringley installed a webcam in her college dorm room, and provided images from that cam on a webpage. The webpage would automatically refresh every three minutes with the most recent picture from the camera. Anyone with Internet access could observe Ringley as she went about her daily life. JenniCam was one of the first web sites that continuously and voluntarily surveyed a private life. Her first webcam contained only black and white images of her in the dorm room, but this was exciting to many net citizens since it was a new technology in 1996.

Ringley states that the site was an attempt to document 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.

Ringley attracted a following both on and off the internet. Ringley owned several ferrets and "Ferret Magazine" featured Jenni and one of her ferrets on the cover of their magazine. Years later, Ringley appeared topless and even nude in "Celebrity Sleuth," an adult magazine featuring B and C class celebrities. Jenni also appeared in an episode of the television show Diagnosis Murder, playing a fictionalized version of herself.

Ringley maintained her webcam site for seven years. After she graduated from Dickinson, the site moved with her to Washington, D.C. and later to Sacramento, California. After leaving the college dorm, she moved to housing that consisted of more than one room, so she added webcams to cover the additional living space (four webcams captured images of her life). Eventually, she started to charge for access to her site, allowing both paid and free access with the paid access updating the images more frequently than the free access. She added more pages to her website that included pictures of her cats and ferrets. Her site was doing well as she stayed home and claimed her profession to be a "web designer" for her site.

Money made from the webcam sites paid for a new larger apartment, expensive furniture and several trips to Amsterdam with her accountant, which she claimed were business trips. She began to take trips to visit other cam girls, including Ana Voog of Anacam.com.

At the height of her popularity, an estimated three to four million people watched JenniCam.org daily. Jenni eventually purchased the domain jennicam.com as well. Parody sites arose as Jennicam became more popular as well. One known one was jonnicam.com, the life of a cat who pooped in a litter box.

Ringley appeared as a guest on The Late Show with David Letterman. At the end of the interview, and even after having been corrected once, Letterman plugged the site as Jennicam.net instead of the correct Jennicam.com (Ringley owned both jennicam.com and jennicam.org). People visiting the previously non-existent Jennicam.net found a porn site with the greeting, "Thanks Dave".

The window to Jennifer Ringley's world was closed to the public when, at 12 a.m. on December 31, 2003, the site was closed permanently and the last image went black.

References

• Feminist Cyberscapes: Mapping Gendered Academic Spaces, Blair K., Takayoshi P., COLLEGE COMPOSITION AND COMMUNICATION, VOL 52; PART 2, pages 302-305, ISBN 1567504388
• Jenni's Room: Exhibitionism and Solitude, Burgin, V., Critical Inquiry, 2000
• Gender and power in online communication, Herring, S.C., The Handbook of Language and Gender, 2003
• A camera with a view: JenniCAM, visual representation, and cyborg subjectivity, Jimroglou, K. M., INFORMATION COMMUNICATION AND SOCIETY, VOL 2; NUMB 4, pages 439-453, 1999
• tekst.no, Schwebs, Ture & Otnes, Hildegunn, p. 175. Oslo: Cappelen. ISBN 82-02-19673-6, 2001
• Design vs. Content: A Survey of Ten Popular Web Sites That Made Emotional Connections with the User, Vogler, D., Computers in Entertainment (CIE), 2005
• Archive.org for jennicam.org
• Archive.org for jennicam.com
• Archive.org for jennicam.net

Interviews

• with Sam Esmail from esmail.com, where Jennifer reveals that she scored 1400 on the SATs
• This American Life - "Tales from the Net" - Episode 66 - This episode of This American Life featured a conversation with Jennifer Ringley. The interview starts around minute 16.

External links

• BBC News Online - R.I.P. Jennicam
• Odes to Jennicam Poetry about Jennicam
• Jennicam Archive
• IMDB entry
• The First 32 Episodes of JenniShow

Internet celebrities | Internet personalities