Being a girl on the Inter-Net
Text: Georgia Anna Bloom
“A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another....
One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object -- and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”
— John Berger, “Ways of Seeing”
The woman looks at herself looking. The woman looks at herself looking at herself looking. Our It-Girl ancestors knew this or knew this without knowing this, and either way exploited the situation of the internet. Internet It-Girls are experts in controlling their own object of surveillance to the highest point, excising their vulnerability, or otherwise granularly modulating their own unavoidable visibility. The parameters of the internet have spent a long time shifting.
The earliest Internet It-Girls were hardly household names. Jennifer Kaye Ringley, more popularly known by her website domain name JenniCam, was a foundational yet long-forgotten member of the Internet It-Girl canon for her unorthodox take on webcamming. “Lifecasting”, as it was then known, is an easily intuited concept at the time of this writing, where “vlogging” is not only cemented in the culture at large but verging on passé. JenniCam’s lifecasting was both novel and extreme in its 24/7 documentation of her life, her webpage refreshing every three minutes with a live snapshot from her permanently open webcam(s). Ana Voog of the now archived Anacam came a touch later, but her legacy differs in intention. Where JenniCam was documentarian, Ana was a self-identified artist, recognising the potential of the early, primitive network infrastructure and engaging directly with questions of ownership and the female body. It’s interesting to note that Jenni’s disappearance from the net constructed a wider mythology of her character. Ana, on the other hand, is a visible and working artist online now, in 2026, but rarely receives the credits she deserves. It seems something to do with agency, and voyeurism. Both knew precisely what they were doing, or at least were equally intentioned in their operations, but the gloss of passivity seems to have cemented one over the other in the cultural record. An unknowing versus knowing muse.
Where now our digital avatars are a fill-the-blanks, Icon-Username-Bio-Feed that varies infinitesimally between each in the narrow rotation of pre-set platforms, web1.0 required effort and experiment. Ringley created JenniCam as “basically a programming challenge to myself to see if I could set up the script that would take the pictures, upload them to this site... just to get that happening automatically.” I don’t mean to imply an inherent laziness in the current influencer culture, but rather to underline the available frameworks in our user-friendly internet, that the formula of avatar-making is limited and allows for far less variation and demonstration of multiplicity. I often think we’d be better off returning to individual internet spaces that allow the user to choose their ratio of text to image to video, of anonymity to visibility, baffling or saccharine colour schemes and font choices instead of square grids on monochrome backgrounds, coddling UI and a uniform sans-serif. But when everything’s been handed on a platter for so long, it’s not so easy to sell challenge. The metaphor has ended up somewhere where it’s like, the difference between minced jar garlic and fresh garlic, or something.
There’s a new girl in town on the 24/7 streaming, or new-ish. emilycc has been streaming her life on Twitch for the last three years, without pause. Today it reads 1288 days live, she’s getting her hair done, and there are 665 people in the side chat. Attached to her shoulder and neck is a video camera filming what’s in front of her, video-game-perspective-style, and she’s riding a Lime scooter, phone locked into the holder with her own stream reflected at her. It’s not hard to contextualise this within the well-documented loneliness epidemic. She’s the permanent meta-narrator of her own life, and it’s clear from watching her streams that she both views herself not just as both herself and the image of herself, but as the self she watches on her screen of herself, through the screen of herself. This, supposedly, is as real as it gets. How could it not be? Every moment is documented, there’s no editing, there are no filters. Yet even here, the narrative complicates itself. Her identity is fractured between her own modes, every action inevitably tempered by the lurking eyes of a parasocial community. What is it, then, to be authentic? If as women we are always already performing a duality, then what is digital presence but another lens in the prism? The partition of IRL/URL with respect to our “true” identity has only ever been a veneer.
Social media is a tool and a crutch. It’s paramount to be unconcerned with consistency, with logical narrative, with solid branding. If my digital extension can act as a medium for the qualities in myself I cannot express with my physicality, then so be it. There is no real root of the self, necessarily. Or, I work in tandem with all of my selves. Or, all of this is true, or none of it is. If we are objects then let us create them ourselves.