Theresa M. Senft (terri.senft@nyu.edu)

Department of Performance Studies, New York University

Selected material from forthcoming Ph.D. dissertation:

Camgirls:

Gender, Micro-celebrity and Ethics on the World Wide Web

Due as a book from Peter Lang Publishers in 2005

PLEASE do not circulate or quote without permission from me.

Introduction:

The ethical challenge of sexual difference in the age of the global brand.

At the end of December of 2003, the Web’s first and most famous camgirl (Web slang for a woman who uses webcams and interactive journals for autobiographical self-branding) announced she was closing her site.[1] Jennifer Ringley of the JenniCam’s retirement came two years after that of the first webcam star, which was actually a coffee pot. In 1991, frustrated by his attempts to get a fresh cup of coffee from the continuously drained pot shared at Cambridge University, computer scientist Quentin Stafford-Fraser pointed a small camera at the coffee machine, sending images to the staff's computer network for public viewing. Later, the Trojan Coffee Cam went on the Web, garnering a total of over two million hits until its retirement in 2001.[2]

The JenniCam began in 1996 from Jennifer Ringley's Dickinson College dorm room. Its audience, which increased dramatically the first time Ringley transmitted live footage of sex with her then-boyfriend, consisted of anyone with Web access and an interest in watching. By the time it closed, the JenniCam had established itself as the best known of all personal webcam sites, alternately lauded and condemned in hundreds of media outlets. To quote a Museum of Modern Art catalogue, the site has inspired a new sort of “fame after photography.” [3] Yet in the words of media critic Clay Calvert, the JenniCam also is emblematic of our status as a Voyeur Nation. [4] In a statement to Catholic Bishops, cable television mogul Leo Hindery Jr. went so far as to declare the site, “one of the greatest threats to morality and decency that we face today."[5]

Figure 1: The first webcam star and the first camgirl. 1996, five years after the Trojan pot was first wired, Jennifer began webcamming from her college dorm room. Courtesy Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Jennifer Ringley.

Perhaps even more significant than the controversy generated by the JenniCam, is the legacy of women who have taken her example as an invitation to begin webcam sites of their own. This is a feminist ethnographic and critical study of one generation of those women and their viewers. It consists of interviews conducted from 2001-2002, analyses of camgirl sites and the performances therein, and reflections on my own time spent as an ersatz camgirl/expert. I call "feminist" ethnography that foregrounds gender, mindful of Visweswaran's observation that gender "cannot be separated from the categories of race, class, or sexual identity that determine it." [6] To her list, I would add cyberia, Arturo Escobar's term for networked processes permeating communications technologies, financial transactions, advertising, and media culture generally.[7] I agree with political theorist Jodi Dean, who argues, "It's not that feminists are left out of cyberia, it's that cyberia…seems left out of feminism![8]

In this study, I attempt to insert cyberia into feminism by arguing that camgirl communities represent the ethical challenge of sexual difference in the age of the global brand. In the spirit of Emmanuel Levinas, I define ethics as one’s determination of right action in relation to others, yet like Shu-Mei Shih, I reject Levinas’s theorization of the Other as permanently unassailable difference. [9] Historically, ethics has been theorized as a personal matter, compared to morals or politics, which are understood to be social. Yet as Roger Silverstone argues, “no ethics of, and from, the everyday is conceivable without communication,” and “all communication involves mediation.” Thus, in the age of media, the individual and the social are of a piece.[10] Likewise, Freudian psychoanalysis has long argued that that gender is socially constructed, and that sexual difference is intra-psychic and thus, personal. Yet feminists have countered that because these divisions have always been historically contingent, they are open to change. In other words, the personal is political.[11]

Feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray has suggested that for the personal as political to become more than a slogan, an “ethics of sexual difference” is required, in which we un-learn our divisions between the individual and the social and begin to understand the multiple networks that now connect us. [12] In this project, I build on Irigaray’s work to argue that an ethics of sexual difference in cyberia challenges feminists to acknowledge all relationships as both personal and political, including those we don’t intend as such, those not yet recognized by the state, and those declared by others as “unreal.” Camgirls and their viewers make a particularly useful case study in this regard, because as early as 1996, they were negotiating Irigaray’s challenge in cyberia while simultaneously contending with the market-driven form of difference I call global branding.

Branding and its crisis

Perhaps the easiest way to understand global branding comes from the phrase, “vote with your wallet.” In its postmodern iteration, branding allows consumers to identify and make community around market goods in ways that supplement, and sometimes replace older identifications such gender, race, class, religion, nationality and so forth. In an essay entitled, “Why Do Brands Cause Trouble?” Holt explains how the postmodern brand was borne to ease consumer/citizen dissatisfaction with culturally engineered depictions of the “good life,” hallmarks of the modern brand, circa 1950. Today, postmodern branding uses one or all of the following mechanisms to celebrate the so-called “authentic life,” morphing socially contingent operations into dehistoricized, individualized “lifestyle choices,” adopted and discarded at will:[13]

1. Ironic, reflective brand persona;

2. Coat-tailing on culture epicenters (e.g., association with subcultures);

3. Life world emplacement (e.g., verite and other “reality”techniques); and

4. Stealth branding (e.g., word-of-mouth and other “virusing” campaigns). [14]

Interestingly, Holt, a faculty member of the Harvard Business School, now counsels companies to reassess their definitions of a successful brand beyond the postmodern notion of an all-encompassing, ironically detached identity. “What…brand architects fail to understand,” he writes, “is that consumer cynicism with this purely promotional logic will quickly poke holes in these seemingly encapsulated identities.” [15] Although the mechanics of branding operate differently throughout the world, the problems Holt details are now global in scope. In underdeveloped areas, argues Arvind Rajagopal, “businesses struggle not only to establish brands against pseudo-branded and unbranded goods, but also to establish what a brand is, and what it will signify.”[16] Holt delineates the following elements of postmodern branding’s current “crisis of authenticity,”

1. ironic distance compressed (“ironic distance has moved from a credible anti-commercial cue to a clichéd adworld convention in the space of less than a decade”);

2. the sponsored society (“increasingly, the brand agents who are sent into bars and clubs and schools to diffuse a brand virus will be unveiled and scorned with the same venom now devoted to telemarketers”);

3. authenticity extinction (“postmodern branding is now running a fine-toothed comb through…countercultural dead ends to mine the last vestiges of unsponsored expressive culture”);

4. peeling away the brand veneer (“now brands whose politics are less overt are starting to receive the same once-over [as Benettton, Ben &Jerry’s and the Body Shop]); and

5. sovereignty inflation (“The dependence today upon cultural ‘infomediaries’ [such as]Martha Stewart, Entertainment Tonight…and collaborative filtering devices [such as] Amazon.com …and TiVo…[means] consumers want to author their lives, but they are increasingly are looking for ghostwriters to help them out.”)[17]

Camgirls as Brands

Camgirls began as one subculture’s response to the postmodern brand’s authenticity crisis, reflecting the fact that in Western nations, this crisis has been brought on in large measure by the Internet, which offers the means to distribute self-generated media on par with "indie" materials circulating in large advertising campaigns. In camgirl-inspired communities, otherwise unaffiliated individuals gather to reflect on the lifestyle of a person who self-presents for public viewing as authentic; that is, not affiliated with corporate media. As in the Seven-Up "uncola" campaigns, camgirls present their life as “untelevision.” Consider Jennifer Ringley’s comment to ABC News, "I just want to show people that what we see on TV-people with perfect hair, perfect friends and perfect lives--is not reality. I’m reality."[18] As effective as this campaign seems on its surface, viewers quickly find themselves engaged in all the contradictions inherent in all postmodern brands , and more. For example, a viewer may profess to hate camgirls, seeing them as contrived and attention seeking, yet find herself defending one camgirl in particular as “the real deal.” A viewer may send fan mail to a camgirl he idolizes, only to get return mail asking for a job reference. Viewers may travel to what they expect is a “clean” website while at work, only to discover it now houses pornographic material. Alternately, they may expect pornography, and receive none. Finally, she may viewer may watch in horror, as I did, the webcammed suicide attempt of someone with whom they converse everyday, yet for whom they have no home address to give police.

For the remainder of this chapter, I want to analyze means through which camgirls secure, and then destabilize what we know about branding today by performing as “reality micro-celebrities” on the Web. First, I will detail the elements of what I call the camgirl aesthetic, considering the technical requirements needed to engage in this practice of self-branding, and discussing camgirls’ demographic profile to date. I will briefly relate my discovery of the Japanese “net idol” phenomenon to illustrate how the postmodern brand might be functioning in other cultural contexts. From there, I consider camgirls as a form of subcultural “reality micro-celebrity,” explaining how I devised my research methodology for this project with an eye on subcultural politics. After broaching recent “camgirl migration” from webcams to blogs, I end by detail how each chapter of this book tackles ethical considerations raised by those who participate in camgirl subculture.

Figure 2: Camgirl aesthetics 102. At the JenniCam site, a small live image (to the right of the "start here" command) gives viewers a taste of what the site offers. "Chat now" leads to a public bulletin board, inhabited mostly by long-time JenniCam fans, rather than Jennifer herself. Courtesy Jennifer Ringley.

Figure 3: Camgirl Aesthetics 101 Amanda's face is always visible at the Amandacam site, but the "guest cam" link must be chosen in order to view her live webcam. Amanda routinely chats with her viewers in her "members" section, which also provides viewers access to nine webcams. "Oliver" refers to Amanda's dog, and "47 covers" are magazine-style headshots of Amanda. Courtesy Amanda.

The camgirl aesthetic

The most obvious element of the camgirl aesthetic is the webcam itself. Given the range of uses to which webcams are routinely put today, it is important to distinguish homecamming (the technique camgirls employ) from other practices. First, as the name suggests, homecamming is conducted primarily from the domestic sphere, usually from the bedroom or the living room of one's home. Second, with the exception of a few gay men, women run every homecam that has a significant number of viewers. Third, homecamming is an autobiographical practice and not a spying technique. Although it is common for homecammers to get into trouble for writing in their online diaries about offline relationships, I have yet to hear of a case where a homecammer didn't inform her guest of the existence of a camera in the home.

Figure 4: Homecam aesthetics 103.Above, Ana Voog of Anacam, the first self-proclaimed camgirl artist, leaves her live image large on the site's menu page. In the top left-hand corner, she's activated a random word-generating program. Clicking on each of the images on the right leads to journals, bulletin boards, fan art pages, and Ana’s artwork and crochet projects. Feminists will notice links to RAINN (Rape Abuse and Incest National Network), RAWA (Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan), and SHP (Street Harassment Project.) Courtesy Ana Voog.

Beyond a refreshing webcam, camgirls are also expected to sponsor, or at least point to, galleries of their older archived images. On the most popular sites, all sorts of “extras” can be found, such as fan-generated artwork, online bulletin boards, and members-only sections where viewers get an opportunity to speak with one another in a private setting, with or without the camgirl present. It is nearly mandatory that a camgirl include on her site an online diary where her thoughts are chronicled, called a blog (short for web-log.) Among my subjects, the most commonly used service is LiveJournal, a combination blogging and bulletin software that allows interaction with one’s readers. With more than 100,000 upated blogs daily and a million people who call themselves members, LiveJournal is currently the "largest structured networked community online."[19]

Figure 5: The author's blog on LiveJournal. Posts are arranged chronologically, and readers’ responses can be read by clicking on the links marked, “comments.” As the author’s picture on the left-hand side indicates, digital images are easily incorporated into LiveJournal’s format.

Camgirl demographics and technical requirements

Given homecamming's domestic mise en scene and autobiographical emphasis, it perhaps stands to reason that camgirls are a relatively homogenous lot with regard to race, class, and language use. Nearly all camgirls hail from wealthier, high-teledensity areas like North America, Europe, the "Southern Cone" region of South America, and Australia. Although some like Argentine Anabella of Anabella.com make a point of writing in their native language, most homecam sites are in English. [20] Most camgirls are white, able-bodied, female, straight (or bisexual) and less than forty years old, and I have yet to come across a camgirl who doesn't have access to a private room for broadcasting. This last factor may explain why I had particular trouble locating women in places like the Middle East (barring Israel) and Africa (barring South Africa), as these locales tend to use public tele-centers rather than private Internet connections.[21]

That said, I want to briefly recount my experience discovering Japanese "net idols" online, if only to demonstrate the promise of future cross-cultural research in this area. For years, I was curious as to whether Japanese women were using webcams, but because could not read Kanji characters, I was reduced to asking others to help me with my searches online. Unfortunately, many well-meaning individuals sought to save me time by warning me that Japanese women, even those in the pornography industry, were "too shy" to participate in live webcam culture. After months of searching in vain for information, I typed "Japan, beautiful, internet, contest" into the Google search engine, and stumbled across a series of sites featuring still pictures of Japanese girls with ratings attached. One of the sites linked to the homepage of Ellis, who explained (miraculously for me, in English) the Japanese net idol phenomenon:

In order to understand "net idols" clearly, you should know the concept of "idol" in Japan.... Idols do not belong to categories such as a singer, an actress, or a model. They are, just like Ellis, kawaii-cute-female-child-Lolita-like persons in show business. Everyone adores the beauty and cuteness of the idols …Net idols are an Internet version of "idols". But this time, they are amateurs, not professionals. They are real "cute sisters next door", voluntarily beginning to create their own websites. They show off themselves by uploading their pictures, and create close ties using net idol webrings. [22]

Figure 6: Voting for Net idols. Above, a section from a popular site devoted to Japanese net idols. The numbers 0001, 0002 etc. respond to each woman's voting rank, as determined by visitors to their sites. Courtesy Internet Idol Archive. [23]

At a future date, I hope to compare and contrast the Japanese notion of "kawaii" on the Internet with the American notion of the "girl next door" in homecamming.[24] Even in my brief conversations with net idols thus far, I've learned a far more reasonable explanation for why these women don't yet use webcams than the racist, sexist proclamation "Japanese women are shy." Prior to last year, Internet access in Japan had been charged to users by the minute, rather than with a flat fee, as it is in the U.S. However, two significant changes are scheduled for Japan: first, a shift to flat-fee Internet access plans, and second, the introduction of mobile webcams, which are currently granting teenagers never-before experienced amounts of privacy.[25] It is possible that these changes may convince net Japanese women (as well as those in other countries undergoing similar changes) "go live" like their American camgirl counterparts.

Camgirls as Reality Celebrities

Ellis’s comments above demonstrate the mechanics of a particular form I think of as reality celebrity. Film theorist Richard Dyer writes that historically, public discourse about the "reality" of celebrities has operated both to secure and forestall the fantasy that one can truly consume actors on a screen.[26] P. David Marshall agrees, noting, "The whole media construction of stars encourages us to think of 'really’ as in "what is Marilyn Monroe 'really' like? Is Paul Newman 'really' the way he appears in his films?"[27] Yet camgirls are unlike traditional film stars, because in order to be successful as a brand, a camgirl must first be seen by her viewers as real in an empirically demonstrable sense through interactive journal posts, live chats, attention to private bulletin boards, and so forth. Because camgirl celebrity is based on connections with, rather than separation from viewers, those who gather in camgirl communities tend to be interested less in speculating on who a camgirl “really” is, than debating her responsibility to those she invites into her life.

Camgirls respond to their reality celebrity in often ways that are often contradictory. In one breath, a camgirl will explain how she is nothing like a film or television star, but in the next, she will insist that because she opens her life to public scrutiny, she's not an "ordinary" person, either. She might refuse to use the term “camgirl” to identify herself, yet use the term as a sort of shorthand to reference what she sees as a phenomenon. Sometimes, she’ll stop webcamming entirely, yet still consider herself part of camgirl culture. Often, she’ll describe her viewers as “family,” encouraging people to relate to her, while insisting that she remains misunderstood by everyone who watches her or reads her writing. Always, she’ll negotiate what she means, both as a person and a product, with those who alternately see themselves as her customers, her friends, her detractors, or her neighbors on the Web.

How popular is popular? The camgirl as a reality micro-celebrity

In addition, camgirls differ from traditional celebrities in that their audiences are substantially smaller than that most market goods with transnational distribution. Internet sociologists have long found Web audiences notoriously difficult to measure with precision. Camgirl Ana Voog wrote me recently with some press quotes she received over the years about her site. [28] “You can see how they all get the story different or just plain wrong,” she complains:

From The New York Post: “She keeps a purported 700,000 visitors a day coming back for more…” From Goldmine: “gets about 700,000 hits a day” (is it hits or visitors, guys?) From The Philadelphia Enquirer: “…is accessed a half-million times a day by people around the world (now it's half a million people a day!) From Der Spiegel: “…more than 200,000 people (now it's 200,000) From an n2k press release: Voog's Web site receives millions of hits per month…[29]

Figure 7: Unique user, page view, and web hits.

Much of this confusion stems from the vocabulary of the Web, where viewership (called “traffic”) is commonly measured in one of three ways: hits, page views and unique visitors. Technically, a hit refers to every file that a viewer must download in order to see a web page. In the early days of web advertising, sites inflated their audience numbers by adding files to their pages, thus generating more hits. Today, experts insist on knowing the number of page views garnered by a site, yet even this number doesn’t answer the question, “How many individuals have looked at this web site?” Remember that websites are set up as a series of linked pages, and some people examine many pages within a site, giving the impression of multiple viewers. To determine how many individuals have accessed a site, one must access a web site’s unique page viewers, found through referrer logs, which track where an individual was before she got to a particular web site. Different points of origin generally indicate different individuals. Yet because uniques are the true indicators of a website’s popularity, camgirls guard these figures closely, making it difficult for researchers to assess whether Web “stardom” is derived from a broad base, or results from an overly enthusiastic fringe. [30]

Figure 8: Hits versus page views. Compare the two sites above. On Site A, there is only text. On Site B, there is text, a sound file, a movie clip, an image and one refreshing webcam. Site A will register 1000 hits, while Site B will register 4000. Yet when measured for page views, both sites will yield the same number: 1000.

I ran into these problems in my efforts to assess the influence of the JenniCam. I can personally attest to the popularity of the site: during the three days it linked to my homepage, I received more traffic than I had received in six months time. I have responded to many a quizzical look about this project with the rejoinder, “Like the JenniCam?” At this, people nod. They may not have ever seen the site, but they’ve heard of it. And yet, I still do not know the number of unique visitors the JenniCam receives. In a 1998, Salon reported that Ringley claimed 100 million hits per week, which works out approximately fourteen million hits per day. [31] Three years later, in a personal conversation with Ringley’s business manager, Jodi Anderson, I was told that the number is closer to five million per day. [32] After dividing five million hits by five (the number of images on the JenniCam’s original splash page) I can guess that the JenniCam receives a million page views per day, provided users venture no further into her site than the first page, which is highly unlikely. Yet I cannot extrapolate further how many of those one million page views come from individual viewers. This information is private.[33]

Beyond audience numbers, there are other factors contributing to the perceived popularity of a camgirl. For example, although Ana Voog receives only 10,000 unique visitors a day, she is widely regarded among those I’ve interviewed as the Web’s “second most popular camgirl,” due to the large amount of press coverage she has received over the years.[34] I likewise gained press notoriety while webcamming full-time, not because I had the million hits a day and was emblematic of a ‘real’ camgirl, but because as a girl-dissertating-on-webcams-with-her-own-webcam, I made a good media story. Importantly, media attention generated web hits for me, thus creating my popularity after the fact.

Even without a solid grip on the real amount of people who circulate around camgirls, one thing is certain: their audience numbers pale in comparison to mass media personalities. Compare my extremely generous estimate of one million unique visitors per day for the JenniCam to the Neilson ratings for the hit NBC show Friends, which purported 24 million unique viewers for one hour on the first week of November 2002.[35] More people know the name of the Truman Show’s star, Jim Carey, than Jennifer Ringley, who served as an inspiration for the film, just as more people can rattle off the names of the stars of MTV’s Real World than can name three camgirls. Such is the power of television.

“In the future,” Web diarist Justin Hall once quipped, “everyone will be famous to fifteen people.” Hall here alludes to a phenomenon I call reality micro-celebrity, which expands conventional notions of popularity by adding the technologies of self-advertising. Whereas film and television stars are a cultural phenomenon, camgirls are best understood as a subculture, known chiefly by other camgirls, webcam watchers, and those surf through webcam directories,[36] online popularity contests,[37] webcam community sites,[38] webcam portals,[39] and blogs.

Figure 9:Page views versus uniques. In scenario 1, four individuals view only one page on a web site. In scenario 2, one individual views four pages on a web site. Although the page view total is the same in both scenarios, the uniques differ drastically.

On methodology

My methodology for this project relies heavily on cyberspace ethnographers before me, but owes a special debt to my colleague Radhika Gajjala. [40] Radhika's examinations of South Asian women on the Usenet group SAWNET convinced me that in order to remain aware of the power dynamics inherent in online sexual and gender identity-formation, I needed to speak to my subjects one-on-one, consider them in group environments online, examine their webcam sites as modes of representation, and interrogate my position as a so-called "expert" in my field. [41]

From 2001-2002, I conducted thirty-one formal interviews, ten with camgirls and twenty-one with homecam viewers. Some I met at national conferences like South by Southwest; others were gathered from IRC channels were I spent time online chatting; still others were found during time spent participating on the LiveJournal. I also ran a solicitation on some of the more popular cyberspace mailing lists requesting referrals, and announced on my personal home page and camera site that I was looking to interview camgirls and camfans about their experiences. [42]

As per New York University guidelines, I took a number of steps to insure that my research subjects understood their rights in our interview process. First, each subject was mailed a consent form, stating that they were free to use their own name, a pseudonym, or remain anonymous with regard to their interview answers. Once the form was mailed back to me, I sent a list of pre-designated questions via email for my subjects to think over. I instructed them that they could answer as many or as little of the questions as they wished, and that I was more interested in gathering "interesting stories" than I was in every little detail of their lives. Webcam viewers and camgirls were given slightly different sets of questions, which can be viewed as Appendix A and Appendix B at the end of this dissertation.

The first questions I posed were designed to tease out the ways people experienced homecam aesthetics as sites of desire. For instance, I asked viewers to recall their first memories of seeing webcams online, soliciting their impressions of developments in homecamming technologies, such as streaming media. I asked camgirls to describe their experiences making their sites, requesting that they tell me if they had prior experience in the arts before becoming a camgirl. "In general," I queried both groups, "Which are your favorite parts of a homecam site: the refreshing photo(s), the diary entries, the galleries, the fan bulletin boards, or something else entirely? Which are your least favorite parts?"

Next, I wanted to gauge how people felt camgirls functioned as role models in contemporary culture. I asked both camgirls and viewers a series of questions like, "What sort of ethical obligations to you think camgirls owe their viewing public?" To indicate the range of possible answers to a question like this, I added statements like, "Perhaps you feel camgirls have no obligations at all. Conversely, perhaps you feel that since they are putting themselves in the public eye, they should behave in a more circumspect fashion than someone who doesn't choose to live on cam. Maybe you feel somewhere in the middle about these issues. Please elaborate if you can."

I explicitly introduced the concepts of pornography, exhibitionism and voyeurism to the conversation, asking both viewers and camgirls how they defined these terms for themselves. "What's your general opinion on pornography, and particularly online porn?" I asked viewers, adding" or instance, do you go to online porn sites? Do you support the right of others to do so? " Next I asked, "Do you think all camgirls are exhibitionist?" Do you think some are? If some, then which ones?" Of camgirls, I asked, "Do you think of yourself as exhibitionist?" After inquiring whether viewers felt entertainment formats like reality television had changed their perception of the term, I asked, "Do you think there are voyeurs watching camgirls on the Web? Do you consider yourself to be one of them? If so, how so? If not, why not?"

Finally, I asked both viewers and camgirls, "Do you think of yourself as feminist? Why or why not?" I posed the deliberately ambiguous question, "Do you have any thoughts about whether camgirls help or hinder women, overall?" Later, I added, " For instance, some folks have argued that camgirls are 'good for feminism' because they are women who control the means of their own image in media. Some have argued that camgirls are 'bad for feminism' because the image they portray is inevitably made into the same old same old for many (i.e. even outspoken camgirls have the normal assortment of sexist and racist fans, most of whom could care less about their views on anything but nudity.) Do you have any thoughts regarding whether camgirls help or hinder women, overall?"

Some of my subjects simply emailed me back their answers, and we were done interviewing. Others contacted me via Instant Message software chat to talk over their answers and to raise new questions. Two of my subjects decided that they couldn’t adequately convey their feelings via email, and asked that I call them to discuss the questions. One subject requested that we do our interview entirely on video, so that she might use the tape later in her own work. In addition to formal interviews, I’ve had hundreds of private conversations camgirls and viewers.

I tried to physically meet as many of my interview subjects as possible, and was about half-successful. Of thirty-one subjects, I’ve met fifteen. With nearly all of them, the issue wasn’t one of avoiding an in the flesh meeting, but rather problems coordinating schedules and financial restraints on travel. The places I was able to meet my subjects varied: some I met in their homes; others in hotel rooms at various conferences around the country; still others I met during events like LiveJournal face-to-face meetings.

Every person quoted for this project was contact in advance of publication, and nearly all my subjects asked to see my research as it progressed. To facilitate that process, I periodically released chapters of this dissertation in "friends only" format on my LiveJournal. There, the 500-plus individuals I had designated in advance were free to correct, amplify or simply comment on what I'd written in our online community. Quite often, their comments would turn into running conversations, many of which altered my thinking on the material. I've quoted portions of those conversations have been quoted, with permission, throughout this dissertation.

Although there are some communities of camgirls I've left out of my research by design (camgirls under the age of eighteen), others I unable to locate in spite of multiple attempts to do so. For example, although I know African American women are a growing fast sector of Internet users, and I had difficulty finding "non-white camgirls" to interview for this project.[43] Only one—Auriea Harvey—repeatedly appears in this book, and as an expatriated African American artist living and working in Belgium, Auriea can hardly said to be "representative" of any community’s experience.[44] While I broach the issue of “Why is there no Black JenniCam?” in Chapter Two, I still believe the experiences of African American girls online are under-explored by Internet ethnographers, including myself.

Introducing the TerriCam

My friend Jennifer Fink suggested I run my own homecam site in late 1999. At the very least, she argued, I would be able to compare my experiences with those of the women I was writing about. "What a great idea," I remember telling Jennifer over lunch one day. "I’ll make a camera site that really subverts things, and really shows people how to critique this form from the inside." My unoriginally titled "TerriCam" has been live since July 2000. When viewers travel to the TerriCam, the first thing they see is a webcam image of me set against a rust-colored background. Generally the shot is an extreme close-up of my face and neck, which changes (or at least, appears to change) every thirty seconds, verified by a date and time stamp on the image itself. In addition, there is text, reading as follows:

Could this look more like a porn site? Welcome to, uh, me. Click here for a popup view of the cam that will refresh every thirty seconds, unless my system crashes. Then I have to drink some iced coffee, stress out and put things right. I'm on a 56 K modem, so the tech isn't pretty. Because my resources are scant, this isn’t a 24/7 webcam. I do my best, but sometimes my best doesn’t cut it. I should also warn you that I've been WICKED busy teaching and dissertating this semester. God only knows when I'll be in chat, etc. In the meantime, why not do some reading?

Figure 10: Shots from the TerriCam. Keen observers will note the author kept her vow to nut cut her hair until her dissertation was finished.

On my site, I link to my personal home page, my academic and personal papers, and my LiveJournal. I also have a chat room on my site, which breaks every three days. I provide my instant message software contact information, as well as a link for people to send me email. In part, I do all this to compensate for the fact that really, all my viewers ever get to watch on screen is me at my computer, me reading on my bed or me getting ready to leave the house.

I’m hardly the first academic to have a webcam. I saw Sandy Stone’s now-defunct office-based "Sandycam" back in 1999. Nor will I be the last. Any search for "dissertation" and "webcam" yields about twenty people with the same idea as mine. To my knowledge, however, I am the first academic camgirl. My small but somewhat enthusiastic fan base began innocently enough, after my web site was linked to briefly by Jennifer Ringley and Ana Voog, two of the icons of the homecamming movement. I remember telling a friend at the time that I felt a bit like the new pilot television lucky enough to be scheduled a broadcast spot after Friends. Soon, I began receiving attention as "an academic camgirl writing an academic book on camgirls" in venues like Lingua Franca, National Public Radio and Canada's CTV network. Looking back on my time in front of my webcam, I am reminded of something a well-meaning camgirl once said to me: "Nobody except for graduate students really believes in subverting from within. In fact, what does that even mean?" These days I wrestle not to subvert, but to simply accomplish the act of broadcasting the utterly pedestrian nature of my everyday life without getting exhausted by it all.

The waning popularity of webcamming?

Even by subcultural standards, camgirls seem to be growing less popular as an entertainment form. Of all the women I interviewed for this project, only two have continued webcamming full-time: Ana Voog and Annabella of the Argentine AnnabellaCam. [45] Every other camgirl has chosen to stop webcamming entirely, or else continues her site in a sporadic or partial manner. [46] As a nineteen year old at the South by Southwest new media conference wearily explained to me, “Camgirls are so 1998. It’s all about blogging now.” In truth, the camgirl aesthetic, discussed above, has practically mandated the use of blogs from 1998 onward, making discussions the "hotter" technology, somewhat silly. Even those camgirls who have stopped webcamming still keep writing and demonstrating their digital photography for online audiences via blogging services like LiveJournal. What’s more, a number of bloggers who never trained webcams on themselves have now achieved "camgirlesque" micro-celebrity for their intimate, up-to-the-minute posting style online, often with digital photos attached. I discuss the ramifications of “snapshot writing” and “autobiography by committee” in Chapter Six.

Still, my young friend might be on to something in her lament that as a social phenomenon worth investigating, camgirls are “so 1998.” Certainly, this book shifts its focus from early chapters on individual webcam community members, to later chapters detailing connections between users on the interactive blogging service LiveJournal.[47] This progression, which reflects the migrations of my research subjects, appears to be typical of many other Web users circa 2000-2003. This is not to say that women today no longer aspire to be camgirls, nor that people have entirely lost interest in looking at them. Rather, these women and their viewers constitute a different subcultural “scene” than the subjects with whom I began my investigation. Perhaps the most obvious difference is that the women I focused on for this book were in their mid-twenties and thirties, while the next generation of camgirls appear to be in their late teens and early twenties. In Chapter Four, I hint at some possibilities for future analysis in my discussion of “cam whores”: under-age girls who flirt on-camera in exchange for gifts off their online “wish lists.” In brief, I see cam-whores as a limit-case for feminists advocating the political possibilities of parody in networked environments.

Figure 11: Press mentions of webcams v. blogs. To get a rough indication of press interest in the blogging phenomenon, Internet sociologist Eszter Hargittai searched for the words "weblog" and "blog" in the Lexus/Nexus General News section of Major Papers from 1995-2003 (this section includes 47 papers from across the world, including 24 U.S. dailies.) Above, a comparison of Hargittai's results to my searches for "webcam" and "JenniCam" from 1998-2003, using Lexus/Nexus over that same period. Note: the 2003 figures are for the first quarter of 2003 only. Hargittai’s work can be accessed at www.eszter.com/

"This is the game that moves as you play," wrote John Doe from the band X, describing the Los Angeles Punk scene.[48] He could have well been talking about the camgirl subculture. P. David Marshall reminds us that the first stage of celebrity always features machines as the "star of the show."[49] For camgirls, these machines were webcams and blogs, which only three years ago took a significant level of comfort with the Internet to configure. Today, however, an estimated 18 million people have used webcams on the Internet. [50] That number is expected to jump to 29 million by 2005, as manufacturers continue to bundle cameras with home computers, cable modems and DSL connections.[51] In the telecommunications industry, hopes run high that low-cost mobile digital photography will become the next consumer rage worldwide as it is in Japan, where camera-phones currently constitute over a third of the market.[52] In addition, experts estimate that there will be ten million blogs by the end of 2004, with ninety percent belonging to users aged 13- 29 years old.[53] A few of these will no doubt gain press notoriety on par with Baghdad blogger Salam Pax. The majority, however, will exist submerged within what the Perseus Research Group has dubbed, “the blogging iceberg,” where micro-celebrity circulates within small groups overlapping in “x degree of separation” style. [54]Within these networks connecting friends, strangers and those in between, opportunities exist for cross-cultural and transnational expression that cannot yet be accurately forecast.[55]

Figure 12: Blog author demographics. Figures courtesy of the Perseus Group.

Mediated ethics are so 2008

Given the rapid spread of personal branding technologies and the age groups toward which they are being targeted, it seems clear that the ethical issues that were for reality micro-celebrity camgirl communities, “so 1998” will be for us all, “so 2008.” These challenges include but are not limited to the following:

1. Responsibility for impact of our mediated, gendered performances on others.

Although there is a great deal of literature about gender and performance, and certainly substantial material on media and ethics, it is rare to see discussions which combine all these. In Chapter One, “I’d rather be a camgirl, than a cyborg,” I attempt to rectify this situation. I begin by explaining how I came to be interested in camgirls, detailing ways in which the theories of digital drag, gender performativity, sexual difference and cyborg ontology have shaped my thinking to date. After describing my first experience viewing the JenniCam, I demonstrate that there isn't one type of camgirl, but at least five, each producing her own sort of brand and audience. I explain how camgirl production and reception troubles traditional voyeuristic constructions like the cinematic “gaze,” yet also maintain that it is wrong to subsume camgirl performances under the banner of the avant-garde, due to their engagement with what Douglas Holt calls a “cultural branding” and what I call gender-as-brand.

Finally, I point out that although Holt’s notion of “activist branding” and Luce Irigaray’s “ethics of sexual difference” are both responses to problem of the “other” in postmodern global economies, where Holt assumes otherness as a supplement to be reabsorbed into the market, Irigaray sees it as an ethical challenge to business as usual. To illustrate how Irigaray’s ideas about an “economy of fluidity” exists on the Web, I coin the term “aesthetics of the grab” to explain the production, reception and recirculation of camgirl culture. Resisting the current urge to re-brand camgirls with the more neutral name “cyborg,” arguing that the camgirl moniker might be used in conjunction with the aestethics of the grab as a form of strategic essentialism: the act of claiming an identity or label for oneself, while concurrently acknowledging that all labels are inaccurate and/or incomplete in important ways.

2. Resolving the lure of telepresence with the challenge of tele-ethicality.

Chapter Two explores how webcam viewers themselves practice a type of strategic essentialism, treating camgirls as live and real people, in spite of the inaccuracy and incompleteness of telepresence: the transmission of reality over distance. I begin confessing that even when meeting my subjects live, I still feel compelled to return back to their webcams to view them in an "instant replay" sense. This last impulse I link to what media theorists call telepresence, the media-enabled feeling of "being there" with over a physical distance. I argue that one of the unique features of homecamming is that it replaces what Ken Goldberg has termed, telepistemology (the search for truth at a distance) with what I want to call, tele-ethicality (the implication of the viewer in a social contract played out over the Internet.)

To illustrate what I mean by tele-ethicality, I return to my argument regarding homecamming’s aesthetic of the grab. When any viewer expropriates the body of another—even via telepresence—I argue, that grab has a series of social ramifications, both online and off it. To ground my claim, I detail my experiences watching a camgirl I’ll call "Karen" attempt suicide on her web camera, analyzing how a subsequent parody of the event (which used her webcam image) affected a number of different people connected to Karen—myself included.

3. Refiguring networked life as both personal and political.

Where Chapter Two is largely personal, Chapter Three is overtly political, considering tele-ethicality in light of current debates about the private and the public in America. I begin by detailing my time as a camgirl/expert on National Public Radio, demonstrating how camgirl performances are read as irrational within the logic of the public sphere. I then argue that when seen through the lens of feminist camp, camgirls and their viewers both replicate and critique the workings of the intimate public sphere, even if camgirls and their viewers don't seem sufficiently "political" to square with the counter-public as it is commonly theorized. I then turn to the work of Jodi Dean to demonstrate how tele-ethicality precludes sphere-based theorizations over the Web, instead suggesting the network model known as civil society. While civil society may be the best "fit" to describe the politics of camgirls and their viewers, networks pose significant challenges for feminists in that they often dilute, rather encourages difference, as in the discussion of globalization earlier.

By way of example, I employ my theory of the grab to consider the case of underage "cam whores": young girls who flirt on their webcams and in their journals in hopes of receiving gifts from online vendors like Amazon.com. Though it is easy to build a case for these girls as camp performers, I argue, the effect of their message as it traverses the "Lolita economies" of the Web might be psychologically dangerous to them in the long run. I build on Jodi Dean's work on to urge feminist theorists of cyberia to work toward an ethos of networked reflective solidarity: a commitment to engage "others" in our various networks, especially those who intentionally or unwittingly traverse boundaries between privacy and publicity, imagination and reality, the legal and the illegal.

4. Acknowledging complicity and collusion with sex as work .

Chapter Three extends my political argument about the networked nature of the Web by considering the economic ties binding camgirls and their viewers to the two billion dollar per year online pornography industry. Here, I am particularly interested in how network theory "grabs" and reworks the avant-garde notion that an explicit female performer has the capacity to shock (and thereby change), her audience. I argue that far from subverting the status quo, transgressive pornography as been re-couped as a brand within the pornography industry, comparing my thoughts to Douglas Holt’s argument regarding the impossibility of consumerism as transgression in the age of post-modern branding. Following Holt’s exhortation to trace brands to their point of manufacture and demand local accountability, I detail audience reactions to two separate instances in which a camgirl displayed a webcam image of a tampon. Finally, I supplement Holt’s argument with the claim that discussions of pornography ought to be jettisoned in favor of sex work, a form of labor in which everyone surfing the Web is currently implicated.

5. Altering theories of sovereign autobiography to include group-generated commentary, influence and connection.

Chapter Five raises the question: where's the line between autobiography and celebrity in camgirl performances? Should it matter if we cannot locate that line? I begin by considering Stephen Duncombe's observation, "The ideal that one should be the 'entertainer of myself' is a defiant one." If the defiant desire to see ourselves via webcams is "narcissistic"—that is, like Narcissus— I believe that it is high time we located Echo, the female voice of Ovid’s story. One way, I suggest, is to think of webcams as evocative objects, Sherry Turkle's term for an object through which people describe themselves, in order to articulate their shifting notions of identity. Citing the fact that people now speak of themselves as webcams of a sort, I employ grab theory to examine a practice I call "snapshot writing" on blogs like LiveJournal.

After detailing a number of women who may need to actively resist the accidental fame afforded to some posters on blogs, I relate the experiences of camgirl ArtVamp, recently questioned by the FBI over something she wrote in her LiveJournal. Returning to my notion of "the grab" I ask, "If white, college-educated U.S. citizens are interrogated in their homes for speaking out about politics in online venues, do we honestly expect those with less social, economic and political cachet to feel free to use the Internet as an autobiographical venue?" Respectful of the argument that nobody deserves to be "grabbed" for speaking online, I counter that perhaps camgirl-style LiveJournal micro celebrity such as Artvamp's is precisely the way to engage the issue of government surveillance. Like webcamming, the intimate and immediate nature of a blogging has the potential to make real and thus politicize events for viewers. Provided, of course, that viewers think of themselves as part of that online community.

From subversion to resistance to connection

For many, the closing of Jennifer Ringley’s JenniCam marked the end of an era in which one could become a celebrity of sorts simply by “being oneself” over the Web. Camgirls were not the Internet’s first celebrities, and won’t be its last.[56] Nor are camgirls the first to wrestle with the contradictory phenomenon of gender-as-brand in media environments. This distinction rightly belongs to those in the global labor and anti-branding movement, whose struggles are detailed in books like Naomi Klein’s No Logo. Unlike their activist counterparts, camgirls do not consciously subvert the logic of global branding, although there are certainly times when they unconsciously resist it. Rather, camgirls affect both gender-based branding-as-usual and an almost unavoidable awareness of one’s connection to others. As will be discussed in the next chapter, this awareness is due in large part to the technology of the Web, which differs substantially from print and television in that it offers opportunities for immediate and many-to-many response. Lynn Huffer asks performance theorists, “Does the concept of the response, and thus responsibility, even matter in theories of performativity? [57] My answer is of course, affirmative, and by focusing on the ethical considerations of specific performances within camgirl communities in the ensuing chapters, I hope to reveal to feminists new modes of thinking about our responsibility toward others in the age of global media.

Next: Chapter One: I’d rather be a camgirl, than a cyborg

http://www.echonyc.com/~janedoe/ch1B.htm

Figure 13: “Camgirlesque” reality micro-celebrity on LiveJournal. On the left, a copy of the author’s LiveJournal trading card made by LiveJournal user, BlackCustard. Although the trading card project began as BlackCustard’s spoof on the micro-celebrity of his friends, it grew into a full-fledged meme on LiveJournal soon after he posted the cards online. A trading card generator has even been developed for those who can’t wait for others to make them a card. For the record, the author is 38, not 48, and does not really look 18. BlackCustard’s LiveJournal is at http://www.livejournal.com/users/blackcustard and the online card generator is at http://www.apeiros.com/lj/tc.html

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