Webcams are ubiquitous. We are acclimatised to the concept of their existance and hear the word used in day to day parlance on TV and the Internet.
Like all things associated with the internet, the rate of the rise of the webcam is likely pinned to the rate of take up of the internet itself, especially broadband.
Personally, my first recollection of webcams reaching the mainstream was in the Observer newspaper (a UK paper which is called the Guardian on all days except Sunday), describing the popularity of a phenomenon called JenniCam.
It perhaps is not surprising that the reason for the rise in this new technology was to oggle a woman. It was perhaps a vision of a somewhat different and blurred future for the webcam. However, to me this single site and what it stood for seemed to symbolise the onslaught of what has become known as ‘Reality’ TV. Jennicam (a small archive of it here: http://www.arttech.ab.ca/pbrown/jenni/jenni.html) was nothing more than a small 320×240 window onto a young woman’s life between 1996-2003. It took pictures infrequently and showed static images from the various rooms around Jennifer’s house. The concept was merely to show what happens in her life. She didn’t perform, she didn’t charge (except later on but the free cam was still acessible) and wanted to just live her life online.
Whilst her reasons for closing the site were not completely clear at the time, it is certain she will have encountered her fair share of difficult personalities and during her time brushed with fame. She also spawned a whole era of people using their webcams to show their lives, myself included. I helped my housemates of the time start a webcam site in our student house in the UK. We also had a little bit of media attention and whilst trying our best to ‘act normal’, the webcam still had the power to adjust one’s behaviour and it’s true that you were never unaware they were online.
Big Brother and other reality shows took the concept one step futher – in a sense, taking the nerd factor out. Most people opening up their lives to the world of webcam voyeurism up to that point were geeks – or at least knew geeks – they had to be in order to get the thing up and running in any kind of stable fashion in the late 90′s internet. Big Brother et al brought in big production companies and a selection process to bring in the perfect candidates who should hopefully forget they’re on TV and act normally.
It is this original idea that I liked with the first series of Big Brother – that it was coined as a social experiment, and it actually felt like that during the broadcasts. Its popularity showed we are all interested in poking our noses into other people’s lives sometimes and this was a new and somewhat morally questionable (at the time) idea.
In a way, what has happened since, has mirrored that which has happened online. People have more access to webcams (built into laptops, phones, free with a PC etc), and with the rise of YouTube and other sites, they are not just a static image updating every 5 minutes but a world of opportunity for expression, for one to be seen and heard with their views and opinions and silly lipsyncs to Moldovian pop songs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numa_Numa).
The world is your oyster these days – the tools we have access to can and most likely have already changed the world, or at least are changing the media.
On the flip side, perhaps the first thing webcams are known for goes back to its already somewhat questionable popularity – that of oggling members of the opposite sex. The online adult webcam industry is a multi-multi-multi million dollar business, some of which have been making profits since inception for over 10 years. It is, as with the rise of technological advancements, changing to be more immersive, interactive and in-your-face than ever before and shows no sign of slowing down. It is not perhaps surprising how popular it is – perhaps the customers in these pay-per-minute enviroments were once good fodder for a local strip club, but find this more convenient. After all, more people are buying their groceries online now, so why not their kicks too?
Where will it end? Well, frankly it won’t – without some kind of draconian law changes. What is happening in the world of webcams is reflective of the wider changes we see – the merging of traditional media and the Internet, the rise of instant on, instant gratification attitudes in Western cultures, the media capitalising on cheap ‘fame-making’ formats which empower your average Joe and, of course, the fact there is a lot of money to be made out there.
Whilst this first Blog post for Camscape is somewhat of a ramble, I thought I’d just pour out my thoughts and feelings on webcams before settling into something a little more sedate for the rest of the time – that is webcam news, features, interesting links and the like. There’s no harm in some mundane webcam viewing. Is there?
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