Without a net Jenni's public life unplugged
An era is ending as one of the first people to live online signs off


PETER HOWELL
MOVIE CRITIC

Come New Year's morning, Jennifer Ringley will be able to sit on her
couch stark naked, without fear of unseen eyes staring at her.

Her chronically depressed live-in boyfriend Dex will be able to do
likewise, without fretting about e-mails from strangers criticizing
his weight or the size of his manhood. Or telling him to get a job.

Ringley, 27, and Dex, allegedly 29, will be able to have sex without a
peanut gallery appraising their performance. The couple's dog and
seven cats (at last count) will at last be able to walk around their
Sacramento, Calif., home without being observed like tropical fish in
a tank.

That's because on Dec. 31, New Year's Eve, Ringley will finally pull
the plug on JenniCam, her seven-year experiment in Web voyeurism.
Billed as "Life, Online," it's about to become "Private Life,
Offline."

Ringley's global audience - which numbered 100,000 daily visitors at
its peak - will have to find somewhere else to get its kinky kicks.

The exact reasons for the impending demise of JenniCam are still
unclear (she's keeping mum), but one thing is for certain: The whole
starry-eyed notion of an electronic global village on the Web died
long before JenniCam. An era has now well and truly ended.

The world was a lot different when JenniCam began in April, 1996, as a
single cheap plastic Web camera broadcasting fuzzy stills from
Ringley's dorm bedroom at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. Bill
Clinton was still the U.S. president, Mike Nichols's The Birdcage was
the hit movie, the DVD hadn't yet been introduced and "9/11" didn't
conjure images of fear.

And the Internet was something most people were still trying to figure
out how to use, including Ringley, who had been studying economics at
school. By her own account, in her journals on her Web site
(http://www.jennicam.org) and in interviews with a fascinated world
media, she got into electronic voyeurism by accident, with a camera
bought on impulse at a book store. She thought her mom would enjoy
seeing her.

"I never really contemplated the ramifications of it, just plugged it
in," Ringley wrote on her site.

"(I) told myself I'd give it a week. After that week, I decided to
give it another."

If at first it really was just about sending video postcards home to
Mom, it quickly changed when Ringley decided that JenniCam would
reveal all - and that included her nude form, as she loafed on the
sofa, had showers or enjoyed sex with her then-boyfriend Geofry. She
was equally unfettered in her journal entries, talking about her
contraceptive devices, her desire for sex (frequent), her asthma
attacks and shopping.

Word of Ringley's exhibitionism quickly spread, and she struggled to
upgrade her equipment and Internet server to keep pace with escalating
demand. After leaving school, she moved to an apartment in Washington,
D.C., and set up more Webcams in other rooms.

Her economics studies obviously paid off. She funded JenniCam, and
lined her pockets, by creating a two-tiered system for voyeurs: paid
subscribers and non-paying guests.

For $15 (U.S.) annually, subscribers were able to get new views of
Ringley and her circus every two minutes; freeloading guests had to
wait 20 minutes. Ringley also supplemented her income by selling $6
JenniCam bumper stickers ("I Rather Be Watching JenniCam").

She defended her right to be nude in her own home and warned her
growing army of viewers that she wasn't going to put on a show for
them.

"You may see nothing but animals or walls all day long. The point is,
it's not a `show.' Do not expect to be entertained. I keep JenniCam
alive not because I want or need to be watched, but because I simply
don't mind being watched."

But many people thought of JenniCam as a show, especially when Ringley
engaged in X-rated pursuits. Although she was by no means Playboy
material, she represented an illicit thrill for a good many gawkers.

Ringley revelled in all the attention. She appeared on Letterman and
radio talk shows. She was a celebrity judge choosing prospective
brides for Who Wants To Marry A Millionaire, the reality TV show that
gave runaway bride Darva Conger her own 15 minutes of fame (not to
mention a Playboy spread). JenniCam fans would chat incessantly with
each other on Usenet groups like alt.fan.jennicam.

Ringley became the poster girl for the Internet age, the leading
evangelist of the plugged-in world promised at the tail of the last
century. When movies The Truman Show and EDtv came out in 1998 and
1999, both with themes of electronic voyeurism, Ringley and her
JenniCam were often mentioned in reviews.

But The Truman Show and EDtv were both cautionary tales about the
perils of constant attention, and life began to imitate art. JenniCam
fans started to notice how well Ringley was doing with their
subscriptions fees: jetting off to Europe on spontaneous holidays,
buying a vintage Porsche and a new Mustang, investing in a timeshare
and acquiring a wrought-iron four-poster bed.

She was also spending much less of her time at home, and at the "real"
job she professed to have: freelance Web site designer.

Grumbling and cheap shots against her began to mount on the Web.
Hackers knocked her site offline at one point.

What really seemed to annoy subscribers were Ringley's claims of
poverty. It bugged them that she was still pretending to be just plain
Jenni, when they could see with their own eyes that she was living
large.

"I hope she makes a million bucks," wrote one disgruntled JenniCam
subscriber. "It's just irritating watching her lie about it."

Late in '99, Ringley gave boyfriend Geofry the heave-ho. This was just
before the Great Internet Crash of 2000, when the online boom suddenly
turned to bust and many Web site operations were shuttered. Ringley
resolved to keep JenniCam online, but she was getting restless. Within
a year, she'd relocated to Sacramento, taking her cameras and her cats
with her.

She had also attracted a new boyfriend, and her first real scandal.
New beau Dex was the fiancé of another Web cam exhibitionist, who had
befriended Ringley and encouraged her to move to California. True to
form, Ringley did what she felt like doing, and soon she was bragging
online about her love for Dex.

It was around this time that I stopped paying occasional visits to the
JenniCam site. It just got too tawdry and boring. But when word got
out last week that Ringley was finally closing up the shop, I logged
back on. So did many other people, judging by the long wait times this
week to get through to the site.

The site has a simple stark notice of the planned closure on Dec. 31.
No explanation is given, apart from a terse statement from a chatroom
operator that "if she wishes to give a reason, she will post it on the
site."

My e-mailed interview request went unanswered. Speculation on the Net
is rampant.

Is she pregnant? Depressed? Angry? Or just fed up?

News reports speculate that the closure was prompted by a decision by
PayPal, the online payment firm, to cancel Ringley's account because
it won't tolerate her nudity. (What took PayPal so long?)

Money is likely part of the reason; Ringley now talks of how much she
loves shopping at thrift stores. She also no longer works from home
and instead has a job with a non-profit social agency.

But it's clear from reading the archives of her increasingly rare
journal entries that the thrill of being online waned a long time ago.
Especially for Dex, who suffers from chronic depression and
unemployment, and who has been hiding from the camera for more than a
year.

E-mail hecklers had started to really get to him.

A JenniCam journal entry from July, 2002, Ringley's last lengthy post,
expresses her sympathy for her besieged lover, and assails the
couple's critics. The heckling has even hurt their sex life, she said.

"I know it's intimidating when the camera catches you naked, and
people write in droves to say how fat and unattractive you are, to
tell you to `get your fat ***** off the Internet' ... I'd like to point
out that the Internet is not just for the thin or the pretty."

Nor is it a place to spend all your time, unless you really know what
you're doing.

Steve Mann, a University of Toronto professor who has been conducting
his own online life experiment since 1994 with wearable Web gear (his
exploits were documented in the film Cyberman), could see this one
coming. He offers some insight in his new book Cyborg: Digital Destiny
And Human Possibility In The Age Of The Wearable Computer: "A
(subjectless) life on the Web implicitly demands of the viewer: Why
are you watching this?

"In refusing to provide a real subject, the story is left
characterless, and viewers are forced to admit that they have been the
subject all along, whether they are watching Steve Mann's hand raise a
spoonful of cereal to his mouth or watching Jenni hunched over the
breakfast table."

In the end, the medium was no longer the message for Ringley.

She came to the conclusion reached by many others long before her: The
Internet is just a tool, and a life lived entirely in public is no
life at all.


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petehowell@aol.com