How much is too much?

Hi guys this week I’m doing my presentation with Rachel on Krissi M. Jimroglou’s reading, “A Camera with a view: JenniCAM, visual representation and cyborg subjectivity”. So this is just a brief summary of the reading:

This reading examines how Jennifer Ringley an ordinary college student became an Internet phenomenon and basically the first reality celebrity, through her website JenniCAM. She started her website in 1996 as a window for the world to see her day to day life by continuously posting images of her activities, using a camera mounted on her computer. In 1998 she upgraded her site and started posting videos of herself called the JenniSHOW, these videos would be updated every 20 minutes and showed “the ebb and flow of everyday” (p.p 287) including her sleeping, working but also engaging in private activities such as being nude and having sex.

By 1998 she had about 3 to 4 million people visiting her site daily, some even paying “US$15 per year” (p.p 287) to see a new image every 2 minutes. This fascination with JenniCAM is significantly interesting because she is an ordinary person, with quit a mundane life “most of the time, the photos are anything but thrilling” (p.p 287). A few reasons for her success might be because she was the first to transgress the line of the private/public sphere and allow people to see her life as it is without censorship, and novelty is always a recipe for success.

Then there is the fact that curiosity is human nature, and voyeurism had been slightly taboo till then, but suddenly JenniCAM invited voyeurism and surveillance. At around the same time reality T.V programs like Big Brother were created and public surveillance and CCTV were on the rise, which all created an interest and fascination with exhibitionism. But now a days the question of how much is too much, and when do we draw the line at what we think is private is very blurred.

Here are some questions to be discussed during the tut or on the blog:

1) As we have been bombarded by reality TV shows and our interest and ability to see the into the lives of celebrities has grown, if JenniCAM was created now, would it have the success it had in the 1990’s ? And as individuals would you be drawn to her website, why and why not?

2) “Jennifer would seem to offer the perfect heterosexual male fantasy- a voyeuristic window into a woman’s bedroom” (p.p 287) she has to some extent broken away from our “stereotypical” view of how women are supposed to behave (at that time) by both sexualising and objectifying herself. Do you agree with this statement? And how does this relate to women in the media nowadays?

Also here is a link to a clip explaining Jennifer’s story incase you don’t feel like reading what I wrote :)

Hope it helps, peace out!