Reply All - #5 Jennicam

Episode Date: December 15, 2014

In 1996 Jennifer Ringley started Jennicam.org, where she recorded and broadcast her entire life, 24/7. It made her famous. And then, one day, she disappeared from the internet entirely. What'd she figure out about the perils of living publicly before the rest of us did? Alex Goldman tracks her down. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In April of 1996, 19-year-old Jennifer Ringley started a website called Jenny Cam. The site was just a stream of still images from a webcam in her dorm room. Every 15 minutes, a new black-and-white photo would upload. Jenny had her computer studying. Jenny coming back from the kitchen with a snack. Jenny asleep under a comforter. Jenny on the phone. 24 hours a day.

Seven days a week. Today, this seems utterly mundane and pointless. But back in 1996, it was revolutionary. Our next guest is the creator of the very popular Jenny Cam website, which televises the life inside her apartment 24 hours a day, live on the Internet. Please welcome Jenny Cam's own Jenny. Jenny. This is David Letterman in 1998, interviewing Jennifer Ringley about Jenny Cam.

And it wasn't just Letterman. She was featured in newspapers and magazines. She had a cameo on a network drama. For seven years, she was the subject of endless online discussion, debate, and analysis. And then one day, she disappeared. I know this, because for the better part of a year, I've been trying to find her.

From Gimlet, this is Reply All, a show about the internet. I'm Alex Goldman. Even I'm not entirely sure why I'm so obsessed with Jenny Cam. I knew about it back in the 90s, but I didn't really watch it. But as someone who spends almost all of his time online these days, Jenny started to seem like someone

who might have some special insight, someone who's already gone through what we're all living through today. She was one of the first people to live her life in public. She was one of the first people to become a celebrity simply because she was on camera. She was one of the first people to share her most intimate and vulnerable moments with complete strangers online. So why, after living so publicly, did she vanish so completely? So first of all, let me say thank you for doing this.

I really appreciate it. There's no reason that you should necessarily, but I do appreciate it. I don't even know why I picked up the phone. I usually don't. After months of dead ends, inactive phone numbers and emails, contemporary saying that they had no idea where she was, or worse, saying, I think I know where she is, but she'll never talk to you.

When I finally got in touch with Jenny, she wasn't standoffish or mean or even particularly mad that I'd found her. Honestly, she was mostly curious if her mom had given me her number. Why did you think that it was your mom who had given me her phone number? She's done that in the past. Yeah, they're still, you know, full. listed in the phone book and everything, and I've, yeah, I was hoping that she hasn't done that again. My mom was always one of my biggest fans.

She was like the original stalker, so, yeah, she would call me on Saturday morning and, you know, say, I see you're still in bed and you need to wake up. I'm like, Mom, it's 6 o'clock. Jenny and I ended up talking for about three hours, during which she told me the whole story. It all began back in 1996. At the time, Jennifer Ringley was a junior at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. when she stumbled upon a new piece of technology at her college bookstore, a webcam. I was a computer nerd. I've always been a computer nerd, and I had to have one. Pretty quickly realized I didn't kind of have anything to do with it,

and I just spent a good chunk of money at the bookstore on this camera. So I kind of, it was basically a programming challenge to myself to see if I could set up the scripts that would take the pictures, upload them to the site just to get that happening automatically. And I shared it with a couple of friends, like, kind of look, I got this working, and I thought it was kind of neat. In the beginning, it was just her and those computer nerd friends. But then those friends shared with their friends, and they shared with their friends. And at some point, the press began sniffing around.

Somebody at a newspaper in Australia heard about it and wrote an article about it. And pretty immediately things went crazy. I got a call from my ISP that I owed them several hundred. for bandwidth charges and I'd have to move my side. And it was not something I had definitely prepared for. Looking at Jenny Cam as an internet user in 2014, it's kind of hard to see the appeal. But there's something magnetic about watching it.

It was easy to sit there and stare at the screen, anticipating the next picture, another link in a chain that could be assembled into a narrative. Jenny's on her bed in thigh-high boots, so she's going out. Jenny's in a tank top and sweatpants in front of her computer, so she's staying home and chat. on IRC. Jenny and a guy are laying next to one another in bed, so they'll fall asleep reading,

or they'll end up having sex. This, of course, the possibility of witnessing nudity or sex, was also a huge part of the appeal. Maybe it would happen in the next image, or the next image, or the next. The first time one boyfriend and I did start kissing, the site went down pretty much immediately from too much load. So, and then, of course, you know, I hear the computer beeping. I look over. And once he realizes that just kissing has overloaded this site, like, he didn't come back into my room again.

Nobody wanted to be on it. Nobody wanted to come into my room. Even though the nudity was like almost incidental, just by the fact that people were so excited by the fact that you're kissing on camera, they crashed your website, there was a sexual undertone, I guess I would say, to what you were doing. And was that something you thought about when you set it up? I think I decided that it was going to be more of a pain to have to turn the camera around when I was going to get changed, that it was going to be more of a pain to have to cover it up when something was going to be happening, that if I really wanted to be able to ignore the cameras as much as I wanted to, that they just had to keep running.

If I'm, as I'm choosing my boyfriend, I'm going to stop that to walk over to the other side of the room and, like, no, that's just not a, I didn't want it to be disruptive like that for me. Was there any part of you that felt that it was empowering or was excited by it? Like, was there any part of you that was like, this is a part of this I actually enjoy? Or was it just another part of this experiment? I'm not going to lie. I mean, there were certainly a couple of times that, you know, I would put on something and, like, check myself out. And, like, it was almost like looking in the mirror in a dorm room.

I didn't have a big mirror, so I'm doing it in the camera. It's just, you know, prance around the room. I'm not going to deny that there's a certain amount of, you know, insecurity that goes along with being, you know, 19 years old. It's natural to be seeking approval. But I also tried not to listen too hard to the feedback that was either really good or really bad. So why exactly was she doing this? we've come to expect that when someone does something this extreme,

it's the result of something extreme in their personality. And what's confusing about Jenny is that she's confoundingly normal. She enjoyed the attention, sure, but she wasn't desperate for fame. She wasn't approved exactly, but as exhibitionists go, she was pretty mild. She wasn't in it for the money. She actually refused plenty of opportunities for banner ads or product placement. It kind of seems like once she started it, she just needed to see what would happen next.

It sort of became a mission, this experiment, and radical openness, a mission that every once in a while, she felt really paid off. I was in my dorm room Saturday night doing laundry. I was not, you know, I was a nerd. And I got an email from someone who said, I'm doing laundry too. And I just looked and I saw that you're doing laundry on Saturday night. It's funny because I felt like a loser. I'm sitting home doing laundry on Saturday night. But I saw you are too, so now I don't feel so bad.

and that that kind of just did it for me. That was the turning point where you were like, well, I'm helping someone because I'm doing laundry and they're doing laundry at the same time. I don't care anymore. It's just like I'm glad to hear that somehow I gave somebody permission to just be themselves and to be okay with that.

After college, Jenny moved to Washington, D.C., and got a job doing web design. Going from a dorm room to an apartment, she suddenly had a lot more space to document. A Jenny cams superfan gave her a bunch of webcams. his work was throwing out. And she wired her new home. When I lived in D.C., there would have been one in the office, probably two in the office,

one in the kitchen, one in the living room, one in the bedroom. And there was one in the bathroom, but it did not point at the toilet. That was where I turned away. At its peak, her site got 7 million hits a day, which back in the late 90s brought Jenny a lot of attention. There was a Jennycam IRC channel. There was a website dedicated just to pictures of her feet. There were articles about her in the Wall Street Journal and Salon and Modern Farrant magazine. She was a guest on This American Life.

She made a cameo appearance on Diagnosis Murder, a detective show starring Dick Van Dyke. And of course, she was interviewed by the arbiter of late 90s celebrity, David Letterman. This will replace television, as we know it now. This will replace television because this is really all people want. People are lonely and desperate. They're lonely, desperate, miserable human beings. They're reaching out. They want to see life.

somewhere else taking place. It's comforting, don't you think? I think the thing is that if you turn on the TV, you can see Wild America, and you can watch lions and badgers and antelope, eating and sleeping and doing what they do. But for some reason, wanting to see people doing the same thing is considered sick and perverse. Well, I don't know about that exactly. That whole thing was such a blur.

But what always stands out to me was when I was walking onto the stage, Samuel L. Jackson was coming off of the stage. And I can't believe he even stopped to acknowledge me. but he looked right at me and he said, I just checked out your site and I saw some thieves downloading your stereo.

So sorry, I feel like I this stammering nanny is my co-host, PJ Vote. When you just said that, I thought that you were saying that he actually did catch people in the act of stealing things from your house, but he was messing with you. Yeah, no, he was making a joke

that he'd seen, I guess that was the joke was that they were downloading my stereo, not that they were stealing it, but that they were online. You said this was like two-sacons In 2000, it was, people would talk about World Wide Web, like it was magic. That's not a bad Joker Samuel Jackson to make in 2000 about the Internet.

Yeah, that's pretty sharp. All right, well, good for you. So I think it's, like I said before, I think this is the best idea I've heard for that silly Internet thing. Thank you. Yeah, nice meeting. Thank you very much. It's Jenny. By the right back.

By 2000, Jenny had spawned to imitators. Anna Cam, Amanda Cam, Izzy Cam, a new term entered the lexicon to describe them. Camgirl. And the beginning of the end for Jenny Cam, came when she got caught up in a camgirl scandal. Jenny asked me not to use the names of the people involved, but it was the spring of 2000.

Jenny had just moved to Sacramento, and a fellow camgirl who was out there helped her find a place. And then, a few months later, Jenny slept with this camgirl's fiancé on camera. I thought we fell in love. I really, at that time, I felt like I had just met my soulmate.

How could you judge this? You don't know because you're not having these feelings. That's the kind of story you hear a million times in your lifetime. A friend who hooked up with someone else's boyfriend or girlfriend, and there's this sort of tiny drama. For you, it didn't only happen on camera, but it happened in front of hundreds of thousands of people, and everyone decided to take sides.

I mean... Oh, yeah, and I don't... I don't blame them. I said it's one of those things that from the outside, it's so obvious. Cam forums erupted with vitriol, and the outrage wasn't confined to the internet. The Washington Post called her a red-headed little minks and an amoral man-trapper. The Washington Post. Jenny and the former fiancé moved in together.

And as you can probably imagine, their new relationship didn't flourish under that kind of scrutiny. I think what really bit the most was, of course, when that relationship... did start failing, which was almost as soon as anybody could or predicted, but I do think I ended up staying in that relationship for a lot longer than I would have just because I felt like, I really, really went out of my way to make this happen. So I'm not just going to give up. So I definitely felt like there was more of a weight of responsibility on me to try harder just because I had apparently made a huge mistake. Jenny's experiment in radical, unvarnished openness became a performance. The performance of a relationship she wasn't happy in, because to give it up would have been just too great, too public a failure. And then Jenny did something anathema to recording your life 24-7. She got a day job.

At that point, I was going to be gone from the house for, you know, nine hours a day and sleeping another eight hours a day. And life started slowing down for me, too. It's just you get into a routine. I'm not 21. I'm not flailing. I'm not making laughable mistakes every five minutes like you do when you're younger, I guess. It's a little more boring.

Viewer interest in the site began to wane. In late 2003, Jenny announced that she was shutting it down. And on December 31st of that year, Jenny Cam went dark. She backed up her images and journal entries to some zip discs, and through all of it, the cameras, the backups, everything that had to do with Jenny Cam into a box. that lives somewhere in our garage now. I feel like you had this, like, unique position of doing this thing before it was commonplace.

And then you stopped and you've gone very, very far in the other direction. Like, I'm curious, if you feel like you saw something bad that, like, we all rushed into and missed. Do I have any warnings looking back? Please. You're like an Oracle of the Internet. That's scary because I'm not especially wise. That's exactly what an Oracle would say. Jenny rejected our attempts to make her anything other than what she was,

a person who'd done this one thing for very specific reasons. But she did say something that I couldn't help but take as a warning from someone who knows about the danger of living in public the way we do now. She knows that the Internet will always overreact to whatever it decides to shine a light on, heaving both praise and scorn at levels much greater than deserved. I was exhausted at the, I was exhausted. Why were you exhausted? I had to develop a pretty thick skin for both the good stuff and the bad stuff.

There are people that I want to be able to connect with. I don't want to distrust every stranger. I don't want every good thing or bad thing to make me feel defensive or proud. It became almost too thick of a skin. At the time, Jenny stashed her webcams in her garage. MySpace was six months old. There was no Facebook, no Twitter, no Instagram, no YouTube. And now that those exist, Jenny's one of the few people who stays off of them completely.

In fact, she's almost entirely absent from the internet. There are a few pictures of her floating around, and there's a Wikipedia article about Jenny Cam, but the hundreds of thousands of images and journal entries she posted to her site, those are mostly gone. And the Jenny of 2014 is basically ungoogulable. My husband's last name is Johnson and Jennifer. Johnson is practically better than Jane Doe. I never thought I would get married. I never thought I would get married.

But when I did, I was super eager to take his last name. Super eager. Occasionally, she does let slip in the real world that she used to be Jenny Cam. And she says that when she does, people mostly don't get it. They're like, yeah, so what? Big deal. I'm like, well, it kind of was, you know, I'm not going to say it was a big deal, but kind of a deal, and they're like, I don't know, that doesn't sound like a big deal to me. Jennifer Johnson, Ne Ringley, is still a programmer and still in Sacramento.

To find out more about her, you can't follow her on Twitter or Instagram. In fact, if you want to know more about her, you're pretty much out of luck, which is exactly the way she wants it. Reply All is hosted by PJ Vote and me, Alex Goldman. Our producer is Lena Massitzi's. We were edited this week by Alex Bloomberg, Starly Kine, Caitlin Roberts. Matt Lieber steers the ship. Our theme song is by the mysterious breakmaster cylinder.

If you want to see six things that I wanted so badly to keep in the story but I had to cut, you can find them on our website, replyall.com. We're on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, you know, all over the place, all over the internet. Just look. You can also sign up for our newsletter on our website. PJ writes it, and I actually have nothing to do with it, so even I enjoy receiving it every week. We'll be back next Wednesday with another episode. Thanks for listening.