Internet Freakshow

Jennifer Ringley

Internet Freakshow - Jennifer Ringley

Jennifer Ringley made history on April 3, 1996. At the time she was a junior attending Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. Like so many college kids, she wanted to use technology to share her life with friends, family, and strangers alike. This was years before social media and instragram, so Jenny had to get clever if she wanted to share what was going on in her life.

Without access to smartphones and constant internet connections, Jenny instead hooked up a webcam to her computer and set up a website that would update every 3 minutes with images taken from that webcam. The images were grainy, low resolution, and black and white at first, but these restrictions didn’t stop JenniCam visitors from enjoying Jenny’s rather mundane world. At this time, JenniCam was a static webcam in a rather unremarkable dorm room. Still, millions of people tuned in to see what Jenny was up to. In the early years she’d get up to 4 million people visiting per day to see the most recent image.

JenniCam wasn’t always mundane though. At times she’d perform strip teases for the camera. I have to admit that I didn’t ever watch JenniCam, and I have no way to prove my theory, but I really suspect most of her traffic was just waiting to see these sporadic strip shows, rather than tuning into an otherwise completely mundane view of a typical dorm room.

Jenny’s goal was to provide a completely unfiltered and raw look at her life. Without audio to help spread her message, she’d sometimes write notes on post-its and hold them up to her camera to send a message to her viewers. She’d masturbate and have sex on camera. But these weren’t exactly pornographic feeds. She didn’t perform for the camera. She went about her day in the usual way, just with a camera in her room. Typically all you saw was a sheet that was moving around. She was vulnerable and an exhibitionist, but not really a porn star or cam girl in that sense. The images of nudity weren’t really explicit.

However, all this attention Jenny received wasn’t always good. Hackers took over her site at one point and started sending death threats after Jenny didn’t take their initial threats seriously. This was just a small setback in the life of JenniCam, however, and she was back to streaming very quickly afterward.

About a year after starting JenniCam, Jenny graduated in college and was forced to move on from her dorm-based livestreams. She moved to Washington DC and took the next logical steps in livestreams. She set up 4 cameras and allowed viewers to switch between them.

At this point in her streaming career, she started charging for the “good” feeds. Free users could still watch of course, but if you paid Jenny a membership fee, you got feeds that refreshed more quickly.

It’s now 1998 in her streaming career and, as a very early life streamer, her internet fame expanded to the real world as well. Numerous news agencies, magazines, and talk shows did features on Jenny and the way she was leading the way in this new field. She even got a bit part in the TV series Diagnosis: Murder. She was a guest on Late Show with David Letterman. She was featured on The Today Show and World News Tonight. She even hosted a very early internet talk show called Jennishow.

Jenny’s exhibitionist side had led to a good amount of fame and fortune for her. Her audience watched as she moved into bigger and better living spaces, and as she took trips to glamorous destinations.

But this fame was not without its downsides. Her viewers felt a special connection and bond with her, but that meant that some were also critical of a lot of her choices. Some didn’t like the way she’d decorated her apartment, or the boyfriends she had or the friends she’d made on her live streaming journey.

Jenny made herself available to the viewers. Although millions watched her every day, she wasn’t a typical famous person. She participated in the community. She was accessible. Friendly. People didn’t feel like they were watching a stranger online. They felt like they were participating in her life.

In 2003, PayPal started cracking down with anti-nudity and anti-pornography rules and regulations. These new rules meant that Jenny could no longer collect money for her feeds. Rather than find a new solution for accepting payment, she instead shut her webcam down, never to turn it on again.

Jenny simply disappeared from the internet.

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In the years that have followed, people have followed up with Jenny to see if she has changed her mind about her social media blackout. She’s not completely inaccessible. She’s done some follow-up interviews throughout the years where she assures interviewers and the community at large that she is still not interested in revisiting her exhibitionist years. She’s not on social media. She has since gotten married to a man with a very common last name, adding into the complexities of finding her in her new life. She works as a programmer and seems to live a quiet life, just the way she likes it.

Some have called Jenny a trail blazer. Others call her a conceptual artist. I think she was a visionary. She saw a webcam for sale in her college bookstore, and used that webcam to change the internet. At the time her competition in the webcam world was a webcam pointed at a fish tank and a coffee pot, but she saw the potential to point that camera at people and connect them. To let people into each other’s lives, virtually.

24 years later, every major platform offers options to stream live. Facebook, Instagram and YouTube offer life streamers the ability to broadcast mundane or important parts of their lives online, and instantly.

Some technology exists exclusively to life stream. Cameras that clip to your shirt to capture the special every day moments. Phones allow both streaming and receiving of these moments.

I like to think Jenny played a role in getting technology and social media where it is.

While Jenny may not fit into a typical Internet Freakshow - she isn’t a freak or troll or mystery - I like to envision her as someone who would love working at a traditional freakshow where people can visit and observe and interact with those on display. Jenny certain loves putting herself on display. And let’s face it, any of us who share status updates, tweet, or post pictures on Instagram have a little bit of Jenny in them, too.