webcamming

webcamming, broadcasting of sound and images over the Internet using a Web camera, or webcam. The popularity of webcamming is in part due to the fact that it is among the least expensive forms of broadcasting available to the public.

History of webcamming

The very first webcam has origins that predate the World Wide Web, and, by its creator’s own admission, it began as something of a joke. In 1991 computer scientist Quentin Stafford-Fraser found himself frustrated in his attempts to get a fresh cup of coffee from the continuously drained pot that was shared among computer scientists at Cambridge University. The Trojan Room Coffee Camera was born after Stafford-Fraser took a small camera, pointed it at the coffee machine, and wired the camera to the computing staff’s network for public viewing. Later the Coffee Cam was put up on the World Wide Web for public viewing, thus becoming the most-watched pot on the Internet. By the time the Coffee Cam feed had been turned off in 2001, thousands of similar feeds had sprung up, providing viewers with views of everything from city streets to bird nests.

Internet users took the technology in more personal directions as well. The lifecasting phenomenon began in 1996, with Jennifer Ringley, whose “Jennicam” made her one of the first internet celebrities. Jennifer began using a webcam from her Dickinson College dorm room as a social experiment of sorts. The device took a static image of her room every 15 minutes, allowing viewers a look at her quotidian activities, from reading and studying to romantic encounters. Jennifer’s “dictionary definition” of the Jennicam read, “A real-time look into the real life of a young woman.” Ringley turned the feed into a paid subscription site that allowed viewers to observe her more frequently and eventually took it offline in 2003.

With the advent of widely available video chatting services in the early 21st century and the increasing ubiquity of computers and smartphones with built-in webcams, the applications of webcamming expanded substantially. Webcamming now covers a wide range of activities, from private videoconferencing between individuals to semipublic surveillance via corporate intranets and to public broadcasting over the Web. Webcams can be found in nurseries, as part of art exhibits, on street corners, in public parks, in prisons and hospitals, inside offices, as part of news-reporting efforts, and inside the most intimate of places in the home. In mainstream media, webcamming has served as a lightning rod of sorts, fueling debate about the proper uses of entertainment and surveillance in the digital age.

Telepresence

No matter what its intended purpose, the power of all webcamming lies in its ability to convey telepresence—that is, its ability make things at a distance seem close and current. It is important to understand, however, that the telepresence effect of webcams is something of an illusion, because there are always significant losses between what a broadcaster’s webcam sees and what a viewer ultimately sees.

Webcams capture motion as a series of still images called frames, the same way video cameras do. As the old technique of the flipbook demonstrates, when a series of frames is shown, an illusion of continuous motion is established in the eye of a viewer. The faster these frames are shown, the smoother the illusion of motion appears. Likewise, the higher the number of frames per second that a webcam is set to record, the smoother the image projected through a webcam will appear. Most of the newer webcams on the market have speeds that match the standard video rate. This is why current videoconferencing programs require nothing more sophisticated than a basic Web camera, a decent microphone, and a high-speed Internet connection. Indeed, one useful (if perhaps overly simplistic) way to think about how webcams work is to imagine turning a video camera on without a tape in it, hitting "record," and running the camera to the Internet.