SALON

Joe Ashbrook Nickell

Tuesday, Apr 27, 1999 4:00 PM UTC

Real-life “Truman Show”

Six students offer advertisers a chance to sponsor their daily lives -- online, unedited, 24 hours a day.

By

Topics:

In February, six Oberlin College students bought a Canon digital video camera, four Pentium III servers and a fractional T1 line and transformed their lives into the first-ever 24/7 streaming audio and video show. Now they’re looking for sponsors.

The students are hoping to hit pay dirt by becoming the Web’s answer to “The Truman Show.” After all, if Tiger Woods gets paid to wear a Nike cap, why shouldn’t the girl studying economics on the couch?

“I realized that the time would come when people would become famous not because they were born into it or they worked into it, but because of nothing other than the fact that they have a camera on them,” says Erik Vidal, the 22-year old student (and nephew of Gore Vidal) who came up with the idea and funds for href="http://www.hereandnow.net">HereandNow.

The idea has certainly been explored by others. But, while sites like JenniCam offer periodic snapshots, HereandNow touts itself as the first to provide a 24-hour, live, unedited look into ordinary people’s lives.

It’s not clear that advertisers have developed an appreciation for sponsoring such subtle celebrity, however. So far, the site boasts an ad for the Sync, which describes its offerings as “video for the Net Generation” — but no big corporate sponsors.

Log in to watch and there might be a party, one of the housemates watching television or nothing at all.

“This is real life. We’re not here to entertain people,” says Vidal, who — believe it or not — says he’s not interested in emulating MTV’s “The Real World.” And apparently there is an audience for this: Vidal claims an average of 1,000 people are tuned into HereandNow at any given time.

Perhaps predictably, the female roommates get the most attention. “I get people who are obsessed, absolutely in love with me,” said Lisa Batey, a 20-year old econ major. Some aren’t so kind. In response to a “win a date with Lisa” contest, Batey was barraged with hundreds of e-mail messages — not from suitors, but from women who accused her of perpetuating shallow values in relationships. “I guess it got interpreted wrong,” sighed Batey. “I just thought it would be fun to actually meet some of the people who are watching us. I guess I’m not very celebrity-minded.”

The HereandNow participants all seem to be learning a few real-world lessons from the project. Even as Vidal explains that the site’s “traffic could justify advertising, and we’ll need some kind of sponsorship to keep paying for the bandwidth,” he admits that his project may not find the funding it’s after. “This idea of uncensored life, where at any time anybody could do anything, that’s proving to be an extremely racy idea for conservative American companies … I tell you, my view of quite a few things has been darkened considerably by this project.”

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 0 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
New Yorker launches tool by Aaron Swartz to protect leaks: Strongbox, co-created by the late technologist, is an open-source drop box for leaked documents
189 points190 points | 7 comments
vote
New Yorker launches tool by Aaron Swartz to protect leaks: Strongbox, co-created by the persecuted late technologist, is an open-source drop box for leaked documents
141 points142 points | comment
vote
Obstruction will ruin the GOP: Playing politics and abusing the system can excite the extremes, but it's a recipe for long-term political disaster
46 points47 points | 8 comments
vote
Loaded terminology like "entitlements" and "welfare" skews the debate and alters America. How right-wingers use semantic tricks to kill government.
31 points32 points | 16 comments
vote
With the help of Photoshop, artist Yao Lu has made shanshui — traditional ink paintings — of China's landfills
19 points20 points | comment

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations