CYBERPSYCH
The burgeoning popularity of Web cams--video cameras that transmit personal images over the Internet--raises two pressing questions. Why do people do it? And why do we watch them?
The simple answers are that Web-cam subjects like Jenni of JenniCAM, right, are exhibitionists, and that we, the thousands of people who use our computers to watch Jenni and her ilk, are voyeurs. It's a bit like catching a glimpse of a neighbor through a window, only now the neighbor has flung open the door and invited us in.
There's more than prurient interest at work here, however. Despite dramatic on-line stunts like a baby's birth or a virginal couple's "first time" (later exposed as a hoax), most of the activity recorded by Web cams is of the most mundane, humdrum sort: people shuffling papers, talking to friends, reading a book. Perhaps Internet users, wandering the vast and chaotic Web, find it soothing to check in with Jenni or one of her cyber compatriots, as comforting in its way as hearing someone bustle about in the next room. After all, the first Web-cam site featured only a humble appliance, broadcast in 1991 by students at England's University of Cambridge, to let others in the lab know when the coffee was ready.
