Newsweek
June 1st, 1998

And Now, The Human Show
Minute to minute, real life creeps by on the Web

Ana Voog was just another punk rockette on the Minneapolis music scene until last summer when she surfed a Web site called JenniCam and found another calling. The JenniCam made a "ceWebrity" out of Jennifer Ringley, 22, who two years ago installed a "Webcam" in her room that captures her every domestic activity, mundane or X-rated, for the interactive pleasure of cybervoyeurs around the world. "I was totally blown away, and thought it was the thing I wanted to do," says Voog, 32. "I could get my ideas across so immediately to the whole entire world!" With the help of some geek friends, Voog set up her AnaCam. Like Jenni's, it's up 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You can watch Ana on her couch (she has no bed) looking bored, eating a pizza, having kinky sex with her boyfriend - sometimes all at the same time. "It's performance art in an Andy Warhol way," says Voog. "It's profound because it raises a lot of questions about privacy, and porn vs. art. But it's stupid because it's just me laying on the couch."

Peter Weir saw the JenniCam while editing "The Truman Show" in Australia. "I was stunned. In the same room we were working on a fictional version of a reality show, and here it was, one step away from the fiction." Like Truman, Weir adds, Jenni was "living her life in public." Unlike Truman, "she knew she was on camera."

For exhibitionists and self-promoters, lonely hears and peeping Toms, the homecam is a revelation and a revolution. The technology certainly hasn't played out the way science fiction predicted. Panoptic surveillance has been a staple of dystopian sci-fi, from "1984" to "Fahrenheit 451" to the recent movie "Gattaca" - another chilling prophecy from "Truman Show" screenwriter Andrew Niccol. Just this month, complaints of Big Brotherism led California legislators to ban video cameras monitoring traffic at dangerous intersections. A similar outcry arose recently over copcams spying on drug dealers in New York City parks. When it's the government watching, these invasions of privacy are decried as technototalitarianism. But if it's just Netizens getting a kinky thrill gawking at each other online, nobody minds.

Scores of "girlcams" are now browsable via directories with creepy names like Peeping Moe. It doesn't take much to get up and running: a desktop computer with INternet access, a digital camera, some free CU-SeeMe (or similar) software and an arrangement with a server that can handle your fans' daily hit level. The hard-core sites charge "members" for the naughty pix. Others, such as the MeganCam are firmly G-rated. A self described Net Addict, 19-year old Megan Graham, pays $20 a month to broadcast for five or six hours a day from her bedroom in a small town in ILlinois. She deals with pervy requests to take her shirt off (and worse) by ignoring them: "I'm a good girl." Male homecams still lag well behind female. And het sites are rare enough that one of them is flagged, "I AM NOT GAY."

Watching ordinary people go about their ordinary lives is boring enough. Even watching naked young women gets old after a few eye-straining, credit-depleting hours. And yet, even more mind-numbing Webcams are trained on far less animate objects around the globe: the NostrilCam, ToiletCam, Ken's FreezerCam, SushiCam, The CoffeepotCam. As Weird so cleverly demonstrates in "The Truman Show," real life can be deeply banal without the right director punching it up.