Born in Harriburg, Pennsylvania in 1976, web designer Jennifer Ringley
became famous in 1996 when she set up a webcam in her murky dorm room
at Dickenson College. The webcam was set to snap a photograph every
five minutes, 24 hours a day, non-stop, no matter what Ringley was
doing, and posted the image on the internet for all the world to see.
This peek into her life (the life of a young, pretty blonde woman, it
should be added), and her lack of inhibition about sharing it, posed
previously-unasked questions about the relationship between the
individual and internet technology, and sparked a phenomenon. The
private life of a person, including sleep, homework, grooming, and even
sexual experiences, were all there for billions to see and share,
erasing the boundary between public and private life.
When Ringley moved to Washington DC in 1998, she wired her new abode
with multiple webcams, established jennicam.org, and became a true
internet superstar. Soon the site was getting millions of hits every
day, she was appearing on talk shows around the world, was the subject
of doctoral dissertations, condemnations by the Catholic Church and
intense, generally overheated analysis by scholars of every stripe.
Ringley and her little webcams even served as the inspiration for
several movies, including Edtv and The Truman Show, and arguably the
popularity of reality shows can indirectly be traced to her "Jennicam"
as well. Despite that, Ringley doggedly continued to live a relatively
normal life, and apparently had little interest in using the webcam
fame to broker a career as an actress -- her film and television roles
were limited to a single guest appearance on a TV show, playing a
Jennifer Ringley type character.
After years of sharing her life with the planet, Ringley shut down the
"Jennicam" on New Year's Day of 2004, and her private life became
private for the first time since she was in college.
