Jennifer Ringley

Born in Harriburg, Pennsylvania in 1976, web designer Jennifer Ringley became famous in 1996 when she set up a webcam in her murky dorm room at Dickenson College. The webcam was set to snap a photograph every five minutes, 24 hours a day, non-stop, no matter what Ringley was doing, and posted the image on the internet for all the world to see. This peek into her life (the life of a young, pretty blonde woman, it should be added), and her lack of inhibition about sharing it, posed previously-unasked questions about the relationship between the individual and internet technology, and sparked a phenomenon. The private life of a person, including sleep, homework, grooming, and even sexual experiences, were all there for billions to see and share, erasing the boundary between public and private life. When Ringley moved to Washington DC in 1998, she wired her new abode with multiple webcams, established jennicam.org, and became a true internet superstar. Soon the site was getting millions of hits every day, she was appearing on talk shows around the world, was the subject of doctoral dissertations, condemnations by the Catholic Church and intense, generally overheated analysis by scholars of every stripe. Ringley and her little webcams even served as the inspiration for several movies, including Edtv and The Truman Show, and arguably the popularity of reality shows can indirectly be traced to her "Jennicam" as well. Despite that, Ringley doggedly continued to live a relatively normal life, and apparently had little interest in using the webcam fame to broker a career as an actress -- her film and television roles were limited to a single guest appearance on a TV show, playing a Jennifer Ringley type character. After years of sharing her life with the planet, Ringley shut down the "Jennicam" on New Year's Day of 2004, and her private life became private for the first time since she was in college.