Reply All - #5.5 Jennicam Revisited

Episode Date: April 27, 2015

In 1996, 19-year-old Jennifer Ringley started the Jennicam, a 24-hour online chronicle of her life. Seven years later, she disappeared entirely from the internet. But why? Also, PJ and Alex discuss how even in the past five months, the landscape of "lifecasting" has changed. And PJ puts Alex on Meerkat and he gets very uncomfortable. Don't forget! Tomorrow is Email Debt Forgiveness Day! Leave us a voicemail at [phone] about your most anxiety inducing unanswered email. We will post a special mini-episode that is Email Debt Forgiveness Day-themed this weekend. Our Sponsors: http://www.framebridge.com (offer code 'reply') http://www.stamps.com (offer code 'reply') http://www.mailchimp.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

So the thing about doing a podcast about the internet is that the internet is changing all the time. It is a... Even right now. Somebody just wrote a new web page. What's it about? Sports. Oh, that is eminently believable. Also, like, the technologies behind the internet and the way people use the internet is changing all the time.

It's very fascinating. We do a podcast about it. So we did this story back in December about Jenny Ringley. Alex, you did the story. I did. And the idea is that she was possibly the first person to ever stream a video of her life 24 hours a day on the internet. And when we ran that story, one of the points we made was that in a lot of ways what she was doing in 1996 was predicting the way a lot of us would use the internet in December 2014. It's what?

I can't do math. Six months later? It is definitely not. December. Who can tell time? It's four months later. It's four months later now. What has happened in those intervening months is that two of the sort of most rapidly popular apps that people are using Periscope and Mirkat are both apps that make it incredibly easy to use your phone to immediately start live streaming video.

So you can take a moment from your life and you can broadcast it to whoever might want to watch. I found using Periscope for like 30 seconds crazy informative as to how difficult Jenny's life must have been. Wait, why? Because the moment I flipped on the camera, strangers were hounding me to do awful things. What were they saying? Find a dog and kick it. Really?

Take a dollar from a stranger. What they wanted to see was not the mundanity of my life. They wanted to see mayhem. I am right now broadcasting you on Mirkat. What's up, y'all? Cool. Zero people are watching. Yeah, so far.

Did you take it? Oh, two people are watching. And what are they saying? They're not saying anything. I'm eager slash terrified. I hate me. Three people are watching. I'm watching you get less comfortable.

Yeah. Oh, four people are here. How bad do you feel right now? Pretty bad. What's your anxiety level one to ten? Six. What's your anxiety level when you get a parking ticket? Four.

You sort of have to put up with this because we need to record a top. If I just follow you around and did this to you, how quickly would you freak out and actually be mad at me? 10 minutes. Maybe. You mean probably less. Yeah. Oh, 10 people are here now. So this week, we are rebroadcasting the story about somebody who decided to live broadcast every moment of her life, 24 hours a day, seven days a week for many years before that was like a normal app-assisted way to do things. 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 ate 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 this was just one of many media appearances she made.

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 most of his time online these days, she 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, fully 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 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 dollars 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 chatting 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.

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 kissing my boyfriend and I'm going to stop that to walk over to the other side of the room and like,

no, that's 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? 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'd do it in the camera.

It's, 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 in 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 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 the line.

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 the Jenny Cam 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 ferret magazine. She was a guest on This American Life. She made a cameo appearance on Diagnosis murder,

a late 90s 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. It's 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 sight. and I saw some thieves downloading your stereo. Wait, 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. That's my co-host, PJ Vote.

We talked to Jenny together, 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, that they were online. You said, this was like 2000. It was, people would talk about World Wide Web, like it was magic. That's not a bad Joker Samuel L. 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. Have you right back.

Coming up after the break, what makes Jenny, a person who's decided to make her entire life public, disappear completely. By 2000, Jenny had spawned 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 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 have 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. Suddenly, 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. And at that point, I was going to be gone from the house for nine hours a day and sleeping another eight hours a day. Right. 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 disks 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 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. I'm curious, if you feel like you saw something bad that like we all rushed into a mist. Do I have any warnings looking back? Yes, 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, keeping 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 webcam 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 ungooglable. My husband's last name is Johnson, and Jennifer Johnson is practically better than Jane Doe. So 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 it was kind of a deal. And they're like, I don't know, that doesn't sound like a big deal to me.

Jennifer Johnson, Ney 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. The reply all is hosted by PJ Vote and me, Alex Goldman. We were produced this week by Tim Howard,

Shruthy Pinnameney, Lena Maseetis, and edited by Alex Bloomberg. Matt Lieber is a nap and a hammock. Our show is mixed this week by Rick Kwan. Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder and our ad music is by Build Buildings. You can find more episodes at iTunes.com slash Reply All.

Our website is replyall.com, which was designed in partnership with athletics. Thank you for listening. You are the best. We're going to be back at you with an awesome, amazing, super exciting new episode next week.