Assuming some of the world’s server farms survive the apocalypse, the lasting memory of the Internet won’t be privacy fights and fears of commercialization. It will be remembered as the true compendium of the human condition, whether that means blogs obsessed with Corgi butts or the dark corners obsessed with gore. (I won’t be linking to anything there.) Ever since the days of the early web, people like Jennifer Ringley and her Jennicam have been lifecasting, livestreaming, and otherwise feeding into and off of the voyeurism the web has fostered.
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In light of that history, new Tumblr Webcam Tears isn’t particularly surprising. It is, however, a rather compelling (and, at times, hilarious) concept: By taking public YouTube broadcasts of crying — one of the more private moments out there — and gathering them into an even more public aggregator, for all of the rest of us to compare, judge, and emote with, Webcam Tears has brought the meta-privacy worries exemplified by the constant leak of cell phone crotch shots that “were never supposed to get out” to a new heart-wrenching level.Sure, Jennicam and the lifecasters were already putting everything out there, for good or worse. But, at the same time, the web wasn’t anything like it is now. Even things that went “viral” still meant spreading what was essentially an inside joke; if some guy got popular by wandering around naked on a webcam, he still had a reasonable expectation that Mom, Dad, Grandma, and his boss weren’t ever going to simply surf across it. Now, you can’t even keep a private photo of yourself smoking a joint on Facebook for fear that your employer will force you to hand over your password to scour all your dirt.Webcam Tears reminds me of Quell, the art piece that compiled images of kids choking themselves on YouTube. Crying and self-asphyxiation are a long way away from the polished pictures that make up so much of our imprint on the social web now. It’s fascinating to think that, even when just about everybody knows by now that whatever you put online will be there forever, people are still taking the time to share the less résumé-worthy aspects of the human condition. But I suppose that, no matter how gentrified the Internet becomes, it will always still some folks’ support group.Follow Derek Mead on Twitter.