The Blacksheep Online | Chatroulette, What?

Chatroulette, What?

March 12, 2010 - 12:00 pm | Posted by: Staff

The web page loads, my image appears in the lower left hand corner of the page thanks to my MacBook webcam. ">Connected, feel free to talk now" appears on the top right side of the page, the black box above my reflection appears - and it's a penis. It was a man crouching down with his genatlia in front of his webcam. This happened several times in my first Chatroulette experience (the newest internet fad, it pairs two random visitors together through video and text chat), as did people automatically hitting the next button, and someone expecting to see the same ridiculous genital experience, only to find me staring back at them with boredom. And then finally, once in a while, I found some "normal" people, like two college girls from New York or a kid from Chile.

To use popular culture devices, Chatroulette is like the seminal MTV dating show Next without the drawn out, campy sequences of the prospective dates on a bus, and the visitor isn't exactly trying to get a date or show just how shallow they are - rather they're trying to find to find some quick fix of good ole' entertainment. Concisely put, YouTube 2.0 or "YouTube unfiltered", in that the star is not some produced image of what we should care about - but the common person (which might be an overstatement, considering some of the freaks you are likely to come across anytime you are connected with Chatroulette). Nothing is spread through word of mouth, there is no Susan Boyle clip to send to your mom out of admiration and awe; it is live, unpredictable and only between the "stranger" and "you". To say that Chatroulette is the odd bastard child of YouTube is limiting, perhaps more accurately stated - it is the Internet unfiltered.

Users no longer have to use some confining, conformity-based service like MySpace or Wordpress to say what they want, making it maybe the most direct and anonymous the Internet can conceivably be (at this point in time). We have exercised the power of the user so quickly that we have reverted back to where we started before the rise of popular culture. We are at the bare bones of entertainment and storytelling - completely what the users wants to say or hear.

The Chatroulette service does follow in some kind of lineage of misused technology; after all this is a common occurrence to happen after it is spread to the masses to adopt to their own needs or wants. Take, for example, scratching a vinyl record, the record is meant to be played at two speeds from start to finish with no interruption, yet some kid in a New York borough with too much time on his hands thought it sounded cool when you moved a spinning record back and forth - thus scratching was born. But a manipulation of technology like Chatroulette or scratching seems to get too far away from the original purpose, maybe I am too much of a traditionalist to understand it all.

But after all this, the one thing I can't put my finger on is what I was expecting to get out of this experience, entertainment? A glimpse into some peephole of bizarreness, like some kind back alley viewing only a man in a dirty trench coat can lead you to? Or it to actually talk to someone whom I wouldn't come across otherwise? No, that is too obvious. I can't say for certain, but I may just keep clicking the "next button" until I get bored.