Looking Online

By Chris Taylor/San Francisco

How big is voyeurism on the Internet? Let us count the ways. Three years ago, just over a third of a million people bought those little eyeball-shaped cameras called webcams that live on top of a computer monitor, connect to the Internet and can turn anyone's life into a continuous broadcast. Last year 2.5 million webcams were sold. By 2003, sales of these eminently cheap ($50) little devices are expected to hit 36 million. When you buy your next PC, it's as likely to come with a webcam as with a keyboard.

The quarter of a million webcam sites now up and running show everyone and everything from naked mole rats to New York City taxi drivers, all live and unedited. In a recent survey, 39% of college students said they already use or watch webcams. During the broadcast of the original Big Brother in Germany, the show's website--on which you could see all the 24-hour feeds of the participants in the house instead of just the edited TV installments--was clicked on as often as megasites Yahoo and AOL.

Brian Cury, CEO and founder of the webcam portal EarthCam.com adds 30 webcams a day to his site and estimates that around 2 million viewers log on to catch a live image of someone else's daily activities. "People are screaming to communicate using this medium," he says. "Within hours, they start to create an affinity with the people they're looking at."

Just ask Aimee, a 29-year-old certified public accountant living on the North Carolina coast, who receives the affinity of more than 5,000 strangers every day through her website, acamgirl.com Aimee, a redhead with freckles, began broadcasting on the Internet in 1997, back when webcams were still something of a novelty, and has become one of the Web's most watched faces and a fixture at the top of just about every Top-100 webcam list going. Though she refuses to divulge her surname for fear of attracting stalkers, she has no other qualms about giving up her privacy. "It's a way of life," she says. "I don't regret it for a second."

At first glance, it's hard to see why sites like Aimee's have so much appeal. The pictures from her four cameras, updated at the snail's pace of one frame every 30 sec., are as unarresting as your neighbor's vacation slides. She gets her highest ratings when playing her guitar, sitting in front of her computer or rolling around on the floor with her dogs. One evening last week she spent four consecutive hours lying on her sofa. Survivor this ain't.

But Aimee's site is a perfect example of all the things reality websites can do that reality TV can't. For one thing, it's interactive; you can talk to Aimee while you watch her. For another, it's stuffed full of personal scribblings, such as her daily diary and "Freak of the Week" section, featuring her nuttiest e-mail--which consists mostly of drooling idiots asking her to get naked.

Read her sardonic responses, and Aimee suddenly springs to life, as engaging as a well-written sitcom character. Aimee says putting up with the endless voyeurism is a fair price to pay in exchange for finding an appreciative audience for her writing. "I like to think I'm funny," she says. "Nobody would ever see that in real life. You draw them in with the camera, and then they'll stay and read your stuff." What some people won't do for their art.

--By Chris Taylor/San Francisco