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Voyeurism Online: (1998)

Peek-a-boo! The Net has become much more than a text-based exchange medium. People are now putting their personal lives on line, with video. Featured sites include homecams.com, braindump.com, anacam.com, crl.com, simplenet.com, concentric.net/~ballhigh/colorcam.html, chatv.com, and vip.stanford.edu. Hosts are Jane Wither, Andrew deVries, and Stewart Cheifet. Shot on location at the CyberSmith internet cafe in Palo Alto, California. Originally broadcast in 1998. Episode #204.


This movie is part of the collection: Net Cafe

Audio/Visual: sound, color
Keywords: voyeurism; web cam; anacam; 204

Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs

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Segments

The Nose's Homecam Page
George Buce catalogs Websites where individuals or groups of people have given visitors access to pictures from live cameras in their homes. He only includes cameras actually in people's homes and catalogs the sites by whether they predominantly feature men, women, groups of people, or serendiptious visitors to a room. He gives each site a short introduction and offers a link to the home page and, in some cases, a link that opens a remote window of the cam live.

Chipcam
Chip, a veteran of online communities, adds his picture to his personal Web chat site. When he is online you can see him via a color camera that refreshes every few minutes. He feels that cameras are a great tool for overcoming the tendency of computers to isolate individuals. While many people go to women's cameras as sexual voyeurs, he tends to have fewer of these visitors. When he does get the odd request to get naked, he usually tries to draw the visitor into conversation. In the future, he plans to run his camera from a laptop in cafes and other places to offer visitors a glimpse at his everyday life.

AnaCam
Chris Roberts is a computer technician and amateur musician who met a fellow musician called Ana Voog through a chat site discussing voyeurism. Chris captures and archives the pictures generated by Ana's Webcam. Since August 97, Ana Voog has become one of the main "stars" of the Webcam world - a self-described "artist" who lives most of her waking (and sleeping) hours in front of her Webcam. With her playful approach to performing for the camera, her pets, and her little messages about love, music, and poetry, she has gained an enormous following. The fact that she takes the camera into the shower and seems to have very few inhibitions about personal nudity probably has something to do with it too.

Cyber Monitors
How do you monitor the activities of your kids online? The first step is to teach them good judgment. If they are too young to understand, installing software that filters out inappropriate sites could be another option. Some of the most well-known products are Net Nanny, SurfWatch, and Cyber Patrol. These programs use hidden "bad" lists, and allow the parent to configure what they think their children should and shouldn't see. In addition to denying access to Websites, the software will also prevent typing in names and addresses.

The Housewife Cam
Christine, also known as The Housewife, has had a Webcam going for the past six months. Her Website normally receives 10,000 to 15,000 hits a day from people who watch her go through her daily routine. The site offers both streaming video (by subscription only) as well as images from the Webcam. Why does she allow people to peek into her life? Christine says she likes the interaction and visitors being able to see, hear, and chat with her.

Dave & Liz's Cam
Dave and Liz Dillard and their two children have put family life online. The family's camera is live between 8:00 am and 8:00 p.m. daily in their home in Fort Ord, CA. The site gets visitors from all over the world -- even though what is going on is not very spectacular. They originally put the camera up to give family in Texas a way to see how they were doing. At Christmas, the family broadcast the kids opening gifts so that grandparents could join in from thousands of miles away.

Virtually In Person
Most cameras attached to the Web are simple devices -- they take a fresh, static picture every minute or so. Shawn Stepper works on the next generation of cameras - viewer-controlled devices. Shawn has written software that allows the Web visitor to pan, tilt, or even zoom any of five cameras set up in Stanford's Mechanical Engineering Department. His goal is to create devices that will make collaborative work easier among people working from remote locations.

In the Mechanical Engineering Department's "Design Loft," students use the cameras to show off models and plans. Remote participants can see who is currently in the loft and what is written on the whiteboard. Not everyone involved is entirely comfortable with having the cameras around. An audio warning sounds when someone takes control of a particular camera and for some people that's a signal to hide.