There were 7 million people watching me every day. How did you deal with that?Īna Voog: It was insane, a trippy time in my life. Things got really crazy for you in the late 1990s. They'd always say that, “wave at me, can you see me?” It was about people connecting, you know. And all anyone ever wanted was for me to wave at them on the camera. Back then the Internet was so slow – it would take two minutes to upload a 240 by 320 pixel photo. Now you can just tweet something or share it, and it’s so simple. Does it feel weird to know you were doing something two decades ago which everyone else does now?Īna Voog: Anacam was like the first Facebook or Instagram, definitely, but I was doing everything manually. The original Lifecasters – like you and Jenni – predicted social media as we now know it. Now, there’s the Tumblr people the Instagram people, and everyone’s been segregated into their little sections. It felt so exciting, like everyone in the world was going to be connected. I had a chatroom, and there would be truck drivers and priests in there, German professors and twelve-year-old kids from South America. The Internet back then was so much cooler, because people from all classes and races that you’d never meet in real life were interacting online. When you started anacam in 1997, did you ever imagine what the Internet would become?Īna Voog: I actually envisaged a completely different Internet to the one we have now. At Dazed’s request, she’s granted us an exclusive interview to talk about fame, social media, modern celebrity and what it means to have been the Internet’s own home girl.Īs Ana herself says on the original anacam website: welcome to the #voog mothership. Ana also hung up her webcam in 2009, and has since lived a semi-secluded life in rural Minnesota. ![]() ![]() Jenni, uncomfortable with her fame, gave interviews a few years ago announcing her intention to disappear from public life, and has stayed true to her word. They shared their lives via the Internet two decades before Twitter was founded before we began to compulsively share anything and everything we do and think online.Ĭuriously, in the male-dominated tech world, these early pioneers were women. A single image would take three minutes to upload using a dial-up Internet connection. Lifecasters like Jenni and Ana broadcast their lives, continuously, using modems and now-defunct FTP webcams. Hers is truly a life lived online – and a performance which has yet to end. If you wanted to, you could stitch all these sites together in a loose recreation of almost every day of Ana’s life since 1997. Here’s where she sells her freeform crochet hats. Here’s a link to her updated anacam site (the original has fallen into disrepair). Here is Ana’s Vimeo, featuring videos from 1997 up until the present day. And while the Anacam project ran for twelve years in total, numerous other splinter sites are on the web. Ana considers herself to be a performance artist, and she went on to exhibit at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Tracking down Ana online is like disappearing down a digital rabbit hole. At the height of her fame, Ana had stalkers waiting outside her house, death threats – Warren Beatty even watched her having sex with her ex-boyfriend live on camera, stopping halfway through to order a pizza before getting down to more love-making. Which is a tall order, even for a well-connected member of the Kardashian clan.Īna was the Internet’s own home girl, achieving a level of fame matched only by fellow cam-girl Jennifer Ringley, whose JenniCam created the phenomenon that we now call life-casting. To achieve Ana’s level of Internet celebrity, and have 1 in 20 people following her life online, Kendall would need to add 103 million followers. Kendall Jenner currently has 47 million Instagram followers, out of a total Internet user base of 3 billion people. But Ana’s fame eclipsed that of today’s social media stars. We often write about the curse of modern celebrity, and how ill equipped today’s stars are to cope with the downsides of fame. One out of 20 of the entire world’s online population was watching Ana’s bedroom, every day. ![]() To put that number into context for you, in 1998 the total number of Internet users – globally – was 147 million. By 1998, seven million people were watching anacam a day. Ana opened up her bedroom to the world – and the world was watching.Īna Voog quickly found fame. Later, Ana would conceive and birth her child, live on screen. On August 22 1997, Ana Voog launched anacam – a webcam project that uploaded an image every few minutes of whatever Ana was doing at that point in her life.
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