*"The telephone was the death of Montparnasse," as Jacqueline the model used to say.
http://rhizome.org/editorial/2011/oct/26/she-was-camera/
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"As an early online community, camgirls learned to both live on and produce the web together. We were our own audience. If there were people who were not camgirls watching – actual voyeurs – we could pretend not to notice them. While they watched, we taught each other CSS, compared different models of webcams, and complained about web hosts. It would be sexist to call it an endless slumber party at which presumably male viewers sat on the periphery. It was more a boot camp in How To Make the Web where you could show up sometimes in your pajamas.
"The websites we built for our webcams mangled web standards, some intentionally so. (And we did build them ourselves. Even in the late 1990's, relying on Angelfire or GeoCities would be an affront. You had to have what we still called “a vanity domain.”) We abused the tag and the iframe, which allowed us to embed an image that would replace itself with a new image at an interval we could control – each thirty seconds, sixty seconds, three minutes. Viewers could sometimes get an image that refreshed more frequently if they paid for a membership, but it was the apex of the free web, and many camgirls didn't believe in charging unless they were making pornography outright...."
