21st: Live! From my bedroom

Homecam operators all have their own reasons for putting their lives online. But if you look at the substance of the chat about these sites, at which sites are most popular or at how they are cataloged by fans, it's clear that their appeal is built on the way they engage male desire. "How many breasts can you see before it gets old?" asks Ringley. As any online pornographer can tell you, that number has yet to be found. Ringley might find it hard to believe that men will wait for weeks for a glimpse of what they could see elsewhere with a mouse click, but apparently many will. The very fact that that glimpse is so rare seems only to heighten the triumph when they get one.

That personal webcams are beloved by Web voyeurs certainly helps explain their slightly disreputable image. But if the majority of self-styled "fans" of the cams were first drawn to them by a rather conventional quest for titillation, they've sometimes found their ideas about their own desires challenged in fascinating ways.

For one thing, where conventional pornography offers to satiate desire with manicured and manufactured bodies, the truly amateur webcams that do offer up fleshly images for the most part make no concessions to those conventions of female sexiness. These are women who sometimes look awful in the morning, don't hide their cellulite and only get made up the way they, not we, prefer. And a lot of them go even further. A model or actress at either end of the pornography-Hollywood continuum can reliably expect that most published images of her will be flattering to the point of making her unrecognizable to herself. But most webcam owners cede control of their image to the determinations of a cheap, unsophisticated camera set on an automatic two-minute refresh rate. If they are feeding a desire, then, it is a desire not for unreal models but for people who look like the rest of us.

Even if homecams encourage us to find "real" people attractive, it might seem that they are still essentially about predatory men getting their solitary kicks from peeping anonymously at women. Yet these women (and men) are being spied on with their knowledge and consent. There are plenty of voyeur sites that offer pictures of women who've been photographed unknowingly while bathing or sleeping, or when they were too drunk at a party to object (a Japanese specialty). But webcams are different. They instead suggest a deal between an exhibitionist and a voyeur -- even if it is one that neither seems to know quite how to frame.

In their discussion groups, webcam fans are constantly asking themselves why they are spending so much time at these sites. Their postings betray a knowledge of, and often affection for, the objects of their gaze that suggest feelings entirely different from the quick, anonymous transactions of conventional porn. The fact that some of the most involved fans have taken "the next step" and are now presenting themselves on the Web suggests, too, that whatever got them hooked on webcams, they have been affected and changed by them as well.

Indeed, watching to see if Questiongirl or August will ever get completely naked, or if Ana will finally bring a lover home to her pets and her small couch sets one up for a long wait; whatever satisfaction it results in is going to be very different from the instant visual gratification of porn. The wait forces the viewer into introspection and connection. And if the delay doesn't, the owner might. When he gets requests from his visitors to strip, "I try to get them into conversations about that, without actually doing it," says Chip of the Chipcam.

The images these sites offer are both banal and arousing, deeply ordinary and deeply disturbing. They mess with the ideas we have about our own desires -- about what we find attractive or interesting in people. They invite us to be intimates and keep us at a distance. No wonder we are fascinated but don't necessarily "get it" right away.

Walter Benjamin famously identified one of the archetypal figures of early modernism in the flâneur -- Baudelaire's detached observer, walking untraced through the teeming city, who knew, in Terry Eagleton's words, "the delights of possessing unpossessed and seeing unseen." Perhaps homecam fans are a new breed of flâneur, enabled by Internet technology to enter more intimate spaces and moments than their 19th century forebears.

Personal webcam content is most often tedious in the extreme -- it's no surprise that people seeking to make some easy money from the phenomenon have felt it necessary to spice it up with fiction. But what Jenni and Ana and August and Labman and Mystic Seven are doing by inviting us to gaze at them all day and every day is not about conventional desire or commercial entertainment. What makes them troubling and captivating is that, instead of giving us something we already know, they are pioneering both a new erotics and a new kind of performance -- one that could be called the art of the publicly lived private life.

Even the most intriguing of these sites is not very successful by the conventions of rewarding conversation, art-historical profundity or even "amateur" pornography. Their virtual-yet-real-time public recordings of private lives are compelling precisely when it's clear that these are not professional raconteurs, wits or strippers. They fascinate, and produce work that can at least make a claim to be considered as art, just because they manage to communicate their profound ordinariness to us.

Two clouds are hanging on the homecam horizon, threatening this innovative form. One is that celebrity might ruin the progressive charm of the most interesting of the homecam sites: the Anacams and the Jennicams. While people like Jenni and Ana are already celebrities and exist for most of us in a purely mediated, hyperreal space, they are the solitary surfer's own rather wonderfully disquieting discoveries. But now that they've come to the attention of a commercial media salaciously hungry for novelty, the owners of these cams risk being turned into what they at present are the very opposite of -- unremarkable and disposable celebrities manufactured and sold to us within the conventional product cycle of corporate media.

In addition, the Internet has offered some liberation from our mainstream culture's definitions of gender and beauty, and there's a danger these cameras might reverse that. With a camera you can dress up and role-play, but appearing on camera can also make it a lot harder to habitually "genderfuck" (change the gender of your online persona) or to escape the rules of attractiveness that favor the young, the thin and the rich.

But however the viewers and owners of homecams deal with these challenges, they are going to reward our attention. With cheaper cameras and widening bandwidth giving the Web ever more eyes, we all face a future of increasing visual interconnectedness. Not always consciously and not always successfully, the producers and the fans of personal online cameras are already inhabiting that world. They are out there ahead of us, working out how we might be able, and indeed be forced, to change how we approach friendship, art, entertainment and desire.

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