Response 2 – TateY

Projects: Jennicam & Phage

Jennicam: This project or reality TV-like website that Jennifer Ringley started in 1996, before I was even born, was a weirdly revolutionary idea and thought provoking project, even though it was mundane, pornographic, and frankly creepy at times. Before we had the Kardashians or shows like “Big Brother”, this was obviously a very new and interesting experience: to be able to see what someone is doing at any hour of the day or night, with nothing filtered. Since the beginning of human existence, we had been living our lives without cameras on us at all times, but when Jennicam was created, it was almost like a new era had begun: an era in which people could be online at all hours of the day and anyone could watch them. Now, obviously after Jennicam was created not everybody went this route and created a website for them to be live-streamed 24/7, but certainly it was a contributor to the design of our social media platforms and how for the most part, users can interact with people and information at any and all hours of the day. There was also a very valuable part to this project in that it showed the life of a young girl that was abnormal compared to what is typically being shown in magazines, TV shows, and movies. Her unfiltered life showed unglamorous moments that brought to attention that life is not always the way it is portrayed in many popular media platforms. In fact, there was even a comment about this project from a girl that said she “felt bad about staying home on a Friday night” but felt better when she checked in on Jennicam and saw she was doing laundry on a Friday night. 

Personally, I enjoy my alone time and balance my life so that I have enough time to interact and socialize with others as well as just relax and not worry about anybody else. I can’t imagine knowing that anybody in the world could see what I was doing at any given point. In a philosophy class I took last semester, we talked a lot about “the look” which philosopher Jean Paul Sartre acknowledges and talks a great deal about. Essentially, he argues the look from a human is extremely powerful. The look can, in a way, be a form of stealing something (not in a literal, physical sense) away from someone without them knowing. The person being looked at has absolutely no control over how the other person perceives and judges them. Often times we have trouble looking at each others in the eye for longer than a few seconds, and if you are being looked at, most of the time you can sense it. This shows that there is a natural instinct to understanding the power of the look but we don’t necessarily talk about this very much.

He also argued that to reduce the power of “the looker,” you simply look back. If someone is staring at me and not noticing that they are effectively making me feel uncomfortable, I often will look back, even for just a few seconds, to make them aware of the fact that I know they are looking at me. Usually, this returned look ends the entire situation and leaves us both looking elsewhere, wondering what the other person is thinking.

Why am I talking about this? Well, with Jennicam, there is absolutely no way to return the look. She is being looked at at all hours of the day, with absolutely no way to know who they are or where they are from, and most importantly in Sartre’s mind, there is no way to look back. Now, obviously the purpose of this is to be vulnerable and not care about these abnormal things. But obviously this type of one-way interaction could be hard to deal with after a period of time. Jennifer was effectively paving the way for what is now the new norm: to be able to seemingly  know most about someone else’s life without them even knowing.

This is extremely prevalent in social media, outside of the typical “reality” TV shows and programs. Teenagers are used to the idea of vlogging about their day and posting to YouTube, or posting stories on their Snapchat and Instagram about anything they think might interest their friends, followers, and subscribers. In today’s world, the look (without having the ability to look back) is so common that it’s now considered abnormal to live a more private life. I took a break from social media for a couple of months this past year, and many people asked me “why?” All I wanted was to just focus on my own life without always having that “input” of information from sources and people I didn’t want to receive it from, but for a number of my closest friends and family, they didn’t understand why I didn’t just stop logging in, rather than delete my accounts. I could have done that, but I felt that the temptation was too much to stop. I had become slightly addicted and like many Jennicam fans, I wanted to know more about other people because well, it was easy to access. It’s not like they or I desire to know everything about another person (well, maybe there were some creepy stalkers, I can’t make any guarantees) but I believe it’s a natural instinct to want to know things about other people, even if we aren’t specifically looking for this kind of information. The long term effects of this change in social patterns has yet to truly be discovered, but in a way, it’s making it so we are more used to lives online than in person. Pretty soon, most of the population (at least in more developed countries) won’t know what life is like without social media, and that will definitely have, at the very least, minor effects to how we connect, communicate, and socialize with each other face to face. Unless social media platforms can become more “human-like” where interactions can happen in a more “face-to-face” manner, we will be merely displaying information and data about ourselves that anyone can look at.

On a personal level, I find this kind of experience (for both sides, the viewers and Jennie) to be extremely weird and unnatural. I understand the idea of being vulnerable and trying to be honest, but there’s a reason why many famous people who go from having normal lives to being a house-hold name just disappear after a few years because they can’t handle being talked about, criticized, or even looked at that frequently for so long.

It’s also worth noting that these kinds of technologies (live-streaming, camera usage, viewing via wifi, etc.) were certainly not very accessible for poorer people and so most of these “online personalities” were of more affluent people. Obviously this has changed a great deal since 1996, but I think what’s similar is the fact that many of the more affluent, famous, and privileged people on these social media platforms are followed more and essentially “looked at.” The internet and social media platforms can provide a feeling that you are looking at a more realistic representation of what people are like, but if the majority of its users (especially more popular users) are of a particular class, it can certainly give the wrong indication of what “the real majority” of people are like.

Phage. The second project I looked at was Phage. The technology used in this project isn’t necessarily new, but the implementation of both hard drive information and randomizing it in a visual is something I have never seen before. Essentially, a heavily used hard drive has a massive amount of information and data in various formats, and for the most part, this information is only available to the person who owns the hard drive. This project attempts to reveal information and data in a way that randomized what will be displayed.

At first, I didn’t understand what was happening until I read a bit more about the project, and then I was intrigued. What was fascinating about this was that even though information was being displayed and I could read it, I didn’t understand the context, particularly regarding bits of text. Pictures are more easily digestible, but when random text is displayed, I have absolutely no connection to it and I felt intrusive. On the other end, if someone was watching information from their own hard drive be randomly displayed, they would probably know most of what was being shown and feel like their digital property was being stolen.

This project to me speaks most towards the issue of physical property and now digital property. Before, in order for people to feel secure and like their efforts and work could accumulate into some tangible, laws had to be created that would allow us to own physical things like property, buildings, products, etc. Now, with digital data and information being a massive component of our modern world, there is a lot of ambiguity in terms of what is technically protected and what is not. Personally, I’ve never thought about how this information in a way is a “digital self-representation,” but it really is. Though this project is fascinating enough, it would be even more interesting to randomize artificial intelligence information and see what information the computer has gathered and maybe what it predicts someone will be interested in, buy, watch, etc.

In a way, this is really like a “modern-day” museum display. Museum displays typically are considered to show whatever artifacts are left (which in a way is a kind of randomization) from a certain era or civilization and display the physical artifacts in a condensed way for viewers to interpret or just simply wonder about what life was like hundreds of years ago. With Phage, they take randomized bits of information and display them in a condensed way on a screen, and allow the viewer to try to piece together the information into something that is understandable.

Obviously not every person in the world has a digital self, and I’m not necessarily sure we will ever get to that point. There will always be people who simply do not want anything to do with modern technology, but because the vast majority of people already use some sort of technology, (even many people in poverty) whether that’s a credit card, cell phone, smart phone, social media, or even a library card – there is digital information about most people in the world. As long as our servers, hard drives, and cloud-storage facilities don’t get completely eradicated, this information will stay with us whether we like it or not, and if all of humanity doesn’t become extinct in the next couple hundred years, they could take a look back and view photos of Jennifer Ringley live-streaming her life so that they could somehow try to understand how we lived the way we do today.