After reading CamGirls, I thought it would be interesting to do some research on the JennyCam, the first online cam girl. Jennifer Ringley set up a camera in her college dorm room to broadcast her life, her daily life, to anyone willing to watch. The JennyCam was a media sensation! People could log on and watch her normal every day life, read her journals, look at her pictures..when ever they wanted to. Jenny even had the cam on one night when she had sex! She was not trying to make porn; she was just broadcasting her life and occasional sex was part of her life.

The JennyCam shut down in 2004 after an eight year run for Jenny. So I was curious to see if anyone out there was brave enough to have a camera on in their life 24/7 in 2012. Well, I typed in Camgirls in the Google search engine. And what came back was rather shocking, or maybe not shocking, maybe expected in this day and age. There were 72,200,000 cam girl web sites listed! And almost every single one of them was for Porn!

So the age of innocence of the web cam is, has been obviously, over for a long time. The plethora of porn cam sites was overwhelming. How can any one person make any money at their cam site with 72 million sites to choose from? Jenny Ringley was a media sensation as she was not about porn, she was about real life. It is a shame to see that this part of the internet, the cam sites, has been reduced to total smut. And even if I did want to have a 'normal' life web cam, I would not want it listed with 72 millions porn sites! Could you imagine telling your friends to Google search for your web cam site and they being inundated with massive amounts of porn before they could find your nice site?

In an interview she gave at the height of her popularity, Jennifer Ringley told ABC news that she wanted to show people that what we see on TV--people with perfect hair, perfect friends, perfect lives-- is not reality. I'm reality.(Senft, 2008) And yes Jenny showed people that life is sometimes, most of the time, pretty boring. Not much really happens to us all the time. Sitcoms on TV make it seem like we have to be doing something all the time; entertaining friends, talking on the phone, getting dressed to go out, but never really being alone. Real life was in the JennyCam. Life is boring and it seems most of us are happy with our boring lives. I just wanted to say thank you to JennyCam for sharing her life with the world and showing us all that we too are indeed pretty normal.

Work Cited
Senft, T. M. (2008). Camgirls. (Vol. 4, p. 16). New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc,.