I ran across Jennicam a couple days
ago. That's the site where a woman has decided to put her life on
display. All of it. By all of it I mean even the parts that
you or I might want to sweep under the rug. The naked parts.
She keeps a digital camera in her bedroom and it snaps a picture every two minutes. It continues even when she's changing clothes, coming out of the shower, or even having sex. Too many requests for images while she was having sex once caused her server to crash. Jenni isn't alone. She's not the only person doing this. Jump over to a search engine and search for images and you'll find a lot of people placing cameras in their homes or offices and showing live pictures of surprisingly private places. I've found pictures of a swimming pool, a living room, a street corner, a coffeehouse... Anyway, more places than a I can or want to list. That's by no means the end of it either. I'd argue that most home pages include an element of this kind. People, including myself, tell about their parents, their husbands/wives, brothers, sisters, friends, jobs, and other experiences. They tell about extremely personal experiences--the death of someone close to them, a birthday, their wedding. I've seen two marriage proposals by means of web pages. Or how about religion? People feel free to tell everything they believe online. Imagine someone trying to do this to you in real life. Would you listen? Would you feel imposed upon? I'm guessing the latter unless you happen to like discussing religion or you know the person pretty well. Somehow people can put out extremely personal things on the net, things they would never expose in person. Would Jennifer expose herself on the street? I have my doubts. Personally, I probably wouldn't tell a casual acquaintance all the stuff I've put on my page. Would I tell my minister about Jennicam or tell a future employer about my interest in science fiction? Probably not, but I have placed it online. Imagine this is common. What does it mean for the future of society? The work of Joshua Meyrowitz, a sociologist, suggests some interesting possibilities. Meyrowitz imagines a theory of mass communication that's based on one of Erving Goffman's theories of interpersonal communication. Erving Goffman's "dramaturgical theory" imagined the world as a stage. Every player (person) defines their own role and tries to present that role to the people around them. They're judged on how well they present that role. Thus people make a point of acting in a particular role when they're "on stage." People don't make an effort to make the "off stage" and "on stage" portions of their lives consistent. This is partly because different people view different parts of the person's life. Meyrowitz suggests that the success of feminism results in part from television giving women access to areas that men usually kept "off stage" to their wives and daughters. Examples: Life in the the office. Public affairs. Life outside of women's sphere of influence in general. Thanks to television women could see and identify with male images on screen, allowing them to compare these images to their own lives and imagine more possibilities than before television. Put simply, women were exposed to all the possibilities men were exposed to--possibilities traditionally kept "off stage." Meyrowitz suggests that electronic communication promotes a blending of childhood and adulthood, the private and public life of public figures (Clinton for example), and the private and public in everyone's life. Which brings us back to Jennicam. It's hard to imagine anything more private than a person's bedroom, but, that's where Jennifer put the camera and now the private becomes very public on her page. Even with guest access you've got a fairly decent chance of seeing her naked. I have dropped by around 8:30am or so to find a picture of her and her boyfriend sleeping on the bed. Though Meyrowitz created his theory before the creation of the World Wide Web, I think it likely that the web continues the blending of the public and private portions of life. What I'm curious about is where this leads and at what point this ends. I think that the blending of the public at private must stop at some point. I'll talk about that more in my next essay, "Jennicam and the Civilizing Process." |