When life is an open book

In 1998, college student Jennifer Ringley ate, slept, dressed, designed websites and had sex. The world watched her every move.

Ringley had programmed her webcam to take a photograph of her in her room every three minutes and broadcast it onto the Internet, in an experimental live documentary she called Jennicam. The response was overwhelming

Jennicam became a household name and gained an international following of Internet users. The “show” was so popular that people were paying for premium accounts, raking in comfortable earnings for Ringley.

Over the next five years, Jennicam made its mark on the Internet as the pioneer of “lifecasting” – streaming live footage of people going about their daily routine.

Private yet public

Jennicam is widely regarded as an early example of the Internet blurring the public-private divide. The power to publish content for a global audience has revolutionised our way of life, notes pop culture critic Hal Niedzviecki:

“Peep culture is Reality TV, YouTube, Flickr, MySpace and FaceBook. It’s blogs, chatrooms, amateur online sex, virally spread digital movies… and citizen surveillance. Peep is the backbone of Web 2.0”

In his 2009 book The Peep Diaries, Niedzvicki views Peep Culture as a modern concept. In this social media age, we are all running our own Jennicams, posting photos and videos that curated from within our lives, and watching others live on TV screens, through shows like Survivor .

reality-tv

Image Credit: Chris Madden

However, I’m inclined to think that Peep Culture has in fact existed all along. Across the ages, humans have always displayed an exceptional interest in peeking into the life of others.

This innate desire first manifested as public spectacles, such as those in the Colosseum in Rome. The invention of film created a window into another world, a diegetic space that we could peek into, comfortably seated behind the fourth wall.

Jennicam appeals to our inner voyeur on a deeper level. The opportunity to peek into the bedroom of a girl, uncensored and with the assurance of anonymity, is a fantasy come true.

What then motivates individuals like Ringley to exhibit their lives for the peeping pleasure of others? Niedzvicki posits that nostalgia for the tribal past may be the reason:

“The arrival of Peep as a primary cultural past-time suggests how much we long for the kind of cohesion and recognition we used to be able to get from the tribe.”

In being fully transparent with our lives, we build a sense of community. In posting on social media, we relate to and communicate with fellow beings. So while the action of peeping implies intrusion, it could also be seen as a welcome visit from other strangers we long to connect with.

Perils of peep culture 

As Peep Culture gains traction globally, it may lead to exploitation of the individual for “corporate and government data-mining”, warns Niedzviecki.

Indeed, when individuals may give up their privacy on the Internet for thrills, they are in fact handing over valuable personal information and data patterns to the powers-that-be.

And that too, for free. ( Reminds me of  A Bit[E] of Me)

Singapore is openly embracing the mining personal data in public domain. In a Big Data conference I attended this year, speakers explored the possibility of pandemic control using mobile data, as well as reaching out to AIDS patients with Facebook Data.

big-data-infograph

Big Data has applications in national issues like healthcare. Image Credit: Alphasixcorp

On the topic of Big Data compromising individual privacy, Mr Steve Leonard, Executive Deputy Chairman of the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore said:

“If everybody wants to be anonymous and not disclose anything, then that’s okay. But we may fail or take longer to solve important problems… The more information you disclose, the more things you might be able to benefit from.”  (Read more here on page 5)

To what extent we are willing to compromise our privacy in this Information Age will therefore be a critical question for this and future generations to ponder.

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Fun fact: Ringley no longer exhibits her life online. In a 2007 interview with VH-1 cable network, she said: “I really am enjoying my privacy now… I don’t have a web page. I don’t have a MySpace page. It’s a completely different feeling, and I think I’m enjoying it.”

2 thoughts on “When life is an open book

  1. Interestingly, one of the members of the panel I was just on who is a corporate lawyer of intellectual property rights, announced to the audience that “privacy is dead.” That may very well be the world we live in today, where it has become not only impossible to protect one’s privacy, but one in which we are seductively convinced to give up our data.

  2. Yup there’s always that attempt to persuade us that we need to sacrifice our individual liberties like privacy for the greater good.

    On a separate note, I wish I could’ve asked the IP lawyer what his views are on the relevance of copyright in this age of seamless content sharing. Is copyright dead too?

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