The Philidelphia Inquirer
March 1998

"The world is getting stranger.'' They're baring their souls, and much more, on the Web"

It's mid-afternoon, and here is a woman called Ana Voog taking a shower in what looks like one of those old bathtubs on legs. Voog, 31, is visible from the knees up, behind the steam-fogged curtain. Oh, now she's stepping out . . . And strangers are watching live, via Voog's own "ana cam," on the World Wide Web. Her frequently unclothed image, new every 120 seconds, is accessed a half-million times a day by people around the world.

Elsewhere, a 29-year-old woman known online as FauveGrrl has a popular Web page called "The List." And what a list it is -- a catalog of the 38 men she has slept with. "He was a stuntman," she writes of one. "I slept with him on the night I was supposed to have been married to Theodore. He had the best body I'd ever seen."

While psychologists try to make sense of it, an orgy of personal Web revelation -- and exhibitionism -- is exploding in both pictures and words with the proliferation of so-called Webcams, graphic home pages, and stunningly frank online diaries. And hundreds of thousands of Web voyeurs are clicking their way through the spew. "The world is getting stranger," said Doug Davis, a professor of psychology at Haverford College who has studied online interactions for more than a decade. "There's something about this, some underlying fantasy that you want to be understood, you want some of the qualities of your soul to be seen," he said. Sometimes, however, the body parts are easier to see than the souls. And, with their obvious appeal to both the exhibitionist and the peeping Tom, phenomena such as nude Webcam images "allow us to express and be rewarded for behavior that has previously been deemed socially unacceptable or even illegal," said Pat Latham Bach, a California doctoral student in psychology who is researching the effect of technology on society. Bach said she detected "an insidious shift in cultural values" in what she sees as an avalanche of salacious online behavior.

The self-exposure on the Internet is separate from the $1 billion commercial click-for-sex industry that first sparked calls for online censorship. Rather, that cyber flasher, or the gut-spiller with the X-rated Web journal, could easily be your next-door neighbor. Or your spouse. Many are regular folks too shy to attach their real names to their online work. "It's a secret sort of satisfaction," Fauvgrrl, an East Coast writer, said in a telephone interview. She said even her boyfriend doesn't know she's the author of her ex-lover Web site. "I've decided that if he proposes, the site comes down," she said. "I'm obviously something of an exhibitionist, but I'm a big chicken as well," she wrote in a separate e-mail message to a reporter.

As for readers and viewers, "We just want to see what people do when they're in their homes," said Jason Dalie, 27, of Montgomery, Ala., who set up his own "Roving Cam" at home after viewing other Webcams. "There's a voyeur in all of us. And there's the element of chance that you'll catch somebody in a compromising position." In the explicit online diary "to daze," readers can find Swarthmore College senior Justin Hall, 23, recounting, among many other things, his experiments with drugs and sex, and how he contracted and treated a sexually transmitted disease. In all of Hall's exhaustive, often-painful self-disclosures, no detail of his life is left to the imagination. "For all the people who find it tasteless, there are also people who find it compelling," explained Hall, who said his four-year-old Web site has 4,000 daily readers. Hall has drawn so much attention that he will be the subject of a documentary film due out later this year. "I feel gifted to have found the Web as a medium where I can publish what I want," he said. Certainly, little of what he writes could be published here. Indeed, added Davis, "We've heard that publishers have warehouses of unpublished manuscripts; now they are all out there on the Web."

There are thousands of Web journals and diaries, and at least a dozen Web-diary "rings" that in some cases link together hundreds of similar Web sites. "A healthy part of it is exhibitionism, cyber exhibitionism," said Kai Pradel, 21, a German who is attending college in Boston, and whose online diary has chronicled his travels. But, according to Pradel, being a cyber exhibitionist does not necessarily mean being as explicit as Hall. "He doesn't maintain his dignity with that," Pradel said.

Voog, a.k.a. Rachel Olson, a Minneapolis singer/songwriter, declined to be interviewed for this article, and, after agreeing to answer some questions in writing, provided no responses. But her Web site brims with her opinions on herself and her ana cam, which she says she launched as an experiment last summer after she saw another Webcam in action -- that of former Dickinson College student Jennifer Ringley. Ringley's JenniCam, which has been uploading an image of the essential Ringley every few minutes since she first pointed it at her dorm room bed in 1995, is now a subscription-based cottage industry.

Voog sees her ana cam as performance art. And, along with the pictures, she publishes her stream-of-consciousness "analog" with rambling ruminations about her saline breasts, her headache-inducing periods, her pets, and the handgun she's been known to point at the camera. In her writings, Voog typically abandons capital letters. "my cam is pure freedom," she writes. "if anything, i think this cam could be a detriment to my musical career, just because people seem not to take a sometimes naked, blonde . . . camgrrl very serious when it comes to artistic 'whateverness.' " "maybe in ten years i'll look back at this experiment and call it ridiculous. but right now . . . intuitively . . . it feels right . . . i feel like i AM doing something . . . even if it's just sitting there and being boring and sleeping a lot." She does seem to sleep an awful lot, and she writes about that, too. "i do have a high level of guilt about sleeping, or even having an abnormal schedule," she writes. But, she says, "i do not let the guilt stop me from what my body says is right and good. i am letting bodily intuition guide me." That bodily intuition seems to have guided Voog into some difficult situations. She writes of being stalked by an old boyfriend after he learned she had sex with another man "on the net" -- meaning, in front of her Webcam -- in November. And earlier this month, she wrote of a "crying fit breakdown thing" over being stuck in her small apartment "with cams on" when her computer froze up. So "i just went into the tub and cried for a few hours," she wrote. While such a "virtual exposing of one's self" can sometimes be seen as an appropriate release, it can also be fraught with risk, said psychologist John Grohol, who researches online behavior. "Psychologically it could be harmful. Like any behavior you can take that to an extreme, you could post details, it could get out of hand, it could also affect your relationships with others, especially if the others are aware and disapprove," Grohol said. Voog also rails against critics who suggest she is commercializing her site (she has begun to offer a $10-a-month service that provides a new picture every 30 seconds, instead of a free shot every two minutes). She writes, "being a 'camgirl' is highly undervalued by a lot of people, but they just can't stop watching me or complaining about it."

By Reid Kanaley