She Is A Camera

27 March 2001 (originally uploaded to beautifultoxin.net)
hardware: hacked QuickCam / boyfriend’s PC software: Webcam32

My boyfriend and I shared a one bedroom apartment in Amherst, Massachusetts with two smaller rooms we each used as an office. Sometimes I used his computer to run a second webcam, a cheap QuickCam a fan had sent me, modified to be extra-sensitive to infrared light. I could use it when asleep, so long as the laptop was aimed at me for a bit of a glow. The QuickCam was the dirtiest of all the webcams, the most ubiquitous. The ‘artists’ among us preferred the 3Com, which came with a lens pack for wide-angles and macro shots, but also, the 3Com was more sensitive to color and contrast. The QuickCam had the tendency to make everyone look like a cyborg. So the only thing to do was to play it up.

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"We are all camgirls now"

In the late 1990's, webcam girls became the first online celebrities. Pairing cheap QuickCams with HTML straight out of Hotwired, hundreds of young women found an audience in those eager for "something" to happen on the Internet. Ten years now after the first generation of camgirls have moved on, it's easier to see what was impossible to argue then: that voyeurism and exhibitionism were a minimal part of the camgirl phenomenon. What enabled camgirls to become internet famous wasn't just being young, or female, or camera-ready -- it was the nascent online social networks they formed around themselves.

As much as we opened up our lives to invite in an audience, we also did it for the sake of pushing what simple tools we had to the limit. We broke IRC, crashed browsers with streaming video, ran up obscene web hosting bills, and tested the "Adult Material" clause of every Terms of Service agreement we came across. We imagined that, someday, we would have always-on access to our audiences, that we could livestream full-motion video and audio instead of still images, that we could grow our membership sites enough to afford the costs of storing as much of our lives as we wanted.

And we were wrong: mobile phone cameras, free web video storage and publishing on YouTube, and more sophisticated social networks made most of these aspirations irrelevant. Rather than evolving a new generation of camgirls, these tools enabled a new generation of Internet users to act like we did. Our obsession with documenting every moment of our lives that we wanted to share, live and in the present, and with as much of our immediate audience as we could, became the status quo practice at MySpace, on Flickr, with Twitter. We were wrong about why what we did mattered. The legacy of camgirl culture isn't in the millions of images produced, but in how we understand online celebrity, sharing & oversharing, and building online community.