Knowing a webcam broadcasts transforms bystanders into image-checking performers within minutes.

Evidence

Here is an experiment: set up a webcam and announce to everyone in the room that it is broadcasting to the Web. Now point it toward someone, and see how long that person holds out before checking their image; I think the longest anyone has ever gone in my home is about five minutes. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised when I discovered that the Canadian television crew who’d been sent down to interview me were hamming it up for my webcam. The crew even started reading my journal once they realized my readers were commenting on what they saw. “My striped shirt is a big hit in Japan!” the cameraman joked after someone from Tokyo posted to that effect. “Tell them the shirt’s from Germany,” he added. I had thought people working in the television industry would be beyond such things. I was wrong. — Theresa M. Senft, Camgirls, 68

Categorization

• XREF: This is an empirical illustration of the audience/anonymized performer dynamics in the reader’s learned sources on public space and self-presentation; also prefigures the self-image-checking behavior of today’s camera phones and Zoom interfaces. — connects to: Photographic documentation can turn automated screen absorption into a staged, noticed performance. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 370; Webcam audiences descend from Victorian sensation-drama theatergoers who enjoyed and critiqued staged realism — Theresa M. Senft, Camgirls: Celebrity and Community in…, 139; Webcam identities split between staged characters and unedited everyday self — Theresa M. Senft, Camgirls: Celebrity and Community in…, 309 (+1 more)
• CANDY: A quotable, concrete demonstration experiment: aim a broadcasting webcam at anyone and they fold within about five minutes.

Broader Connections

• Photographic documentation can turn automated screen absorption into a staged, noticed performance. #corroborates (0.85) — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 370
• Webcam audiences descend from Victorian sensation-drama theatergoers who enjoyed and critiqued staged realism #expands (0.75) — Theresa M. Senft, Camgirls, 139