Jennifer Kaye Ringley born August 10, [ 1 ] is an Internet personality and former lifecaster. She is widely regarded as the first camgirl. She is known for creating the popular website JenniCam. She was the first web-based "lifecaster". Regarded by some as a conceptual artist , [ 7 ] Ringley viewed her site as a straightforward document of her life. This was a new use of Internet technology at the time and some viewers were interested in its sociological implications while others watched it for sexual arousal.
The JenniCam website coincided with a rise in surveillance as a feature of popular culture, exemplified by reality television programs such as Big Brother , and as a feature of contemporary art and new media art.
From a sociological point of view, JenniCam was an important early example of how the internet could create a cyborg subject by integrating human images with the internet.
As such, JenniCam set the stage for conversations regarding the relationship of technology and gender. Ringley's desire to maintain the purity of the cam-eye view of her life eventually created the need to establish that she was within her rights as an adult to broadcast such information, in the legal sense, and that it was not harmful to other adults. Unlike later for-profit webcam services, [ 12 ] Ringley did not spend her day displaying her naked body and she spent much more time discussing her romantic life than she did her sex life.
Sources stated that JenniCam received seven million visitors daily. On April 3, , during her junior year at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania , the year-old Ringley installed a webcam in her college dorm room. On April 14, , [ 18 ] raised as a nudist, Ringley started JenniCam, providing images from that cam on a website. Initially, anyone with Internet access could observe the often mundane events of Ringley's life; however, in June , Ringley started charging viewers for full entry to her site.
