Video
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The lowered cost of producing moving pictures through home video equipment has made everyone an author. This phenomenon was noted as far back as 1979 in the song "Found a Job" by Talking Heads: "Judy's in the bedroom, inventing situations/Bob is on the street today, scouting up locations." The handheld camera aesthetic made popular by home videos resurfaces in television shows like America's Funniest Home Videos, in which viewers are shown other people's humorous video clips,that usually portray a physically or emotionally painful moment, or Cops, which is filmed from the point of view of a camera operator. This cinema-verité aesthetic has shown up in feature films as well, such as those inspired by the Danish Dogme 95 movement or The Blair Witch Project, which reconstructs the fictional disappearance of three young documentary filmmakers through the handheld video they shot while making their film.
The voyeurism of reality television has some of its roots in the personal Web cam, which enables people to broadcast their personal lives on the Internet. By the mid-1990s, the price and availability of web cams—video cameras that could capture low-quality video and broadcast it on the Web—had reached the point where they had begun to see widespread usage. The first person to achieve fame from this new medium was Jennifer Ringley (American lifecaster, born 1976), who broadcast images from her dorm room, and eventually her home, on the website JenniCam. People visited the site to view generally uninteresting images from Ringley's daily life. Eventually, the site went off line, and Ringley disappeared.
By 2005, better quality cameras, software, and Internet infrastructure coalesced into the video sharing site YouTube. In short order, the site has become a site valued at $1.6 billion, where more than 100 million videos are watched every day. It is a source of entertainment, news, parody and commentary, of witness, surveillance and exposure.
