Salon.com was traditionally kind to cam culture when it reported on us. When I was going through old files, I came across this Salon.com article I printed out from Ana Voog’s website in 2003 about homecam operators. It no longer appears in Salon’s archives, but they do make mention of it in this “Best Of Salon: 1998” post, and Ana Voog’s transcription of the article is still up on her site.
Here’s the article in full, without its original hyperlinks, for posterity’s sake:
Live! From My Bedroom
Homecam operators broadcast their daily lives to web voyeurs. Why? For the art or fame, love or money or reasons they can’t quite explain.
By Simon Firth
Salon.com, January 1998
[EDITORS’ NOTE: Some of the sites this article links to contain sexual images or nudity, so if those disturb or offend you, don’t click on them.]
Surely you know Jenni? Or Ana, or Kimi, or Questiongirl? If you don’t, some of your friends most likely do — certainly your male friends. They just might have failed to mention it. But tell these friends you’re writing about personal webcams — Web sites where people are living their lives in front of a camera hooked up to the Internet — and it’s extraordinary how many of them will admit that, yes, they’ve checked one or two of these sites out. Just out of curiosity, of course. It’s old news that there are now thousands of cameras attached to the Internet. Most are still simple, cheap devices that capture a regularly updated single image of a remote place — a scenic view, a coffee pot down the hall, a tank of fish, the local traffic or surfing conditions. But more recently an entire sub-genre of these cameras has emerged — personal cameras or “homecams,” located in people’s most intimate spaces, offering the viewer apparently unmediated insights into their owners’ ordinary waking (and sleeping) lives. Some of these camera sites are immensely boring, and some are really just out to make a buck. Some aspire to performance art without ever really achieving it, and others are just very sad to visit. What they all share is a fidelity to the moment: Every two minutes or so you get a new picture of the owner not just at work or lounging around, but dressing and undressing, snoozing and showering, eating and talking, flirting and, yes, fucking. Not surprisingly, it’s the promise (however remote) of the more fleshly of these activities that’s made some of these sites the sort your friends bookmark surreptitiously — and won them phenomenal popularity.
Earlier last year, the page presenting pictures from the life of a 21-year-old then-college-student named Jennifer Ringley was getting, by her own count, over 100 million hits a week. Ringley says that people who go to her Jennicam site looking for sex, or even flesh, will soon get bored: Faced with repeated images of her sitting fully dressed at her computer, visitors either “get it or get out.” And there are certainly thousands of other places on the Internet that will freely and instantly offer you images far more explicit than any you might eventually see snapped by her camera.
So how then to explain the enormous popularity of sites like hers? And given that most people on most cameras are simply sitting, fully clothed, in front of a computer monitor all day, why does a disreputable air persist around them? Perhaps our unease has less to do with prurience than with novelty: In their banality, these sites are offering us a new and unfamiliar aesthetic — one that is, like all interesting art, visually fascinating, disconcertingly erotic and a provocative reflection of ourselves. If you’ve only seen one personal webcam it’s likely to have been the Jennicam. The widely acknowledged pioneer of living publicly on the Web, Ringley has been doing so now for over two years — first via a camera in her college dorm room (until the volume of traffic got her thrown off the college network) and more recently via a camera in her Washington, D.C., apartment. She has stuck to her self-imposed rules: Never turn off the camera; carry on with whatever she’s doing as if no one were watching. If that means being seen changing, or sleeping, or fooling around with a boyfriend on her bed, then so be it. But while her site is the oldest and the most famous homecam, in the last six months an entire second generation of camera owners, many citing Ringley as their inspiration, has emerged. It didn’t take long for people to realize there was money to be made out of the popularity of sites like Ringley’s.
So part of the second wave has been a whole slew of pay sites (“Ho” sites to some) charging a fee for a regularly updated image of (almost without exception) a woman sitting at home, generally in front of a computer and minimally dressed. Some of these sites are clearly presenting professional sex workers masquerading as amateurs, or are fronts for conventional X-rated businesses. But many are apparently owned by women who have welcomed cameras into their lives as a convenient way of earning hard cash at home to help support a baby or to put them through college. There are also an intriguing number of sites run by husband-and-wife teams — he runs the server and she sits at the computer and smiles. All these sites need to deliver remarkably little to justify their fees. While some offer regular shows, many explicitly promise nothing at all — not even to be in front of the camera for any length or at any particular time. Yet many have reached vast audiences with no marketing.
But visit the Homecam catalog Web site run by Ur-webcam fan The Nose (George Buce) and it becomes clear that these pay sites occupy just a small part of the personal webcam world. If it has its prostitutes, it also has its regular Joes and Janes, its couples, families and babies. Just like the real world, this one is populated by innocents as well as teases, by beauties and brutes, gossips and bores. Buce (the man who coined the term “homecam”) currently lists nearly 200 homecams on his site — and those are only what he calls the “primary sites of interest.”
And an entire online culture has now grown up around the camera sites. Along with the catalogs there are numerous archives, discussion sites, even meta-sites that show you the latest live picture from the 20 or so most popular cameras. Many of the second generation of homecams are run by male fans of women’s sites who, in the words of one, have felt moved “to take the next step” and offer the world images of themselves.
As diverse as the subjects of the cameras are the rationales their owners offer for presenting them to us on the Web. For Ringley it started as a “project” but has grown into a commitment that she can see lasting her lifetime. For musician and artist Ana Voog of Anacam, it’s a fun, surreal experiment in (often naked) performance and play. But not all are as brave (or perhaps as foolhardy) as Jennifer or Ana. For some — the lonely or the vain — the fact that just a smile can bring them mountains of e-mail is reason enough to do it.
For Liz Dillard, who shares her camera with her husband and two kids, the camera is a fun way to show the in-laws back in Texas “how the family is doing.” And for a lot of people the camera is really just an extension of the spirit of online chat. “It’s a way of making myself accountable,” says Chip of the San Francisco-based Chipcam. A veteran of online communities, Chip feels the camera authenticates his online persona. And like Chip, many cam owners stay determinedly clothed and terminal-bound, only turning their camera on when they feel like communicating with the outside world or when they are home. But the majority of homecam operators who offer justifications in their “about me” or FAQ pages confess to not knowing quite why they are doing it — they just needed to try it. For many it will be a transitory stage in self-development or self-exploration (webcams have a high burnout rate). Certainly, if you’re a relatively young woman, leading your life publicly on the Internet can be an intoxicating, indeed overwhelming experience. With no publicity and doing little more than looking prettily wistful, a British woman who had an occasional camera on a friend’s site that became known as Dreamycam was soon getting tens of thousands of hits and several hundred e-mails a day, many asking her to do much more than look wistful.
The costs, just in terms of bandwidth, can be huge: Ringley has had to go to a membership format because no-one would host such a popular site for free. Voog is now selling Anacam mugs and T-shirts. And Ringley has had a nasty run-in with hackers, who broke into her site and replaced her image with mutilated bodies. Whatever got these women started, to keep their cameras going requires considerable perseverance and ingenuity.
What really struck me about this article, and what I highlighted in my notes, is that it says, in 1998, that on his website that catalogued “homecams”, this George Buce only listed ~200 cams as “primary sites of interest”. Jennifer Ringley only started her own homecam, the first of its kind, barely two years prior, so in the two years Jenni ran and pioneered her cam, she inspired an entire “second wave” of homecams, at least 200 other people, primarily women, to code and maintain their own cams, at a time when there were only millions of people on the internet total, not billions. That’s a pretty big impact!
Contrast 200 silent, still homecams with the tens of thousands of camgirls who broadcast on a streaming cam site, in a single night, in 2023, you can see how far we’ve come, and Jenni’s impact becomes even more significant!
Another thing that struck me as interesting about this article, is where it says, “For Ringley, [her cam] started as a “project” but has grown into a commitment that she can see lasting her lifetime.” As we now know, Jennicam only lasted 7 years.
And finally, the last thing that struck me as significant about this article, is the last paragraph, where it talks about the costs involved, both financially, in terms of bandwidth, and emotionally, in terms of Jenni being hacked and her site vandalized with photos of mutilated bodies. It ends in typical Salon.com fashion, with acknowledging camgirl perseverance and ingenuity, which I think we can all appreciate!
