Spin The Video Bottle
Signs that I am getting too old for the internet: Chatroulette terrifies me. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, then consider yourself lucky; basically, Chatroulette randomly connects you to other internet users in webcam chat until you, or they, decide they’ve had enough and press the “next” button, at which time you’re sent on to another random connection, and so on and so on. It’s apparently the New Internet Thing, judging by all the all the press I keep seeing about it, but I’m convinced my reaction to it would be the same as New York magazine’s Sam Anderson:
I got off the ChatRoulette wheel determined never to get back on. I hadn’t felt this socially trampled since I was an overweight 12-year-old struggling to get through recess without having my shoes mocked. It was total e-visceration. If this was the future of the Internet, then the future of the Internet obviously didn’t include me.
Never mind the tales of the high percentage of users who’re just naked dudes masturbating; it’s the whole lack of control/being continually judged thing that makes me convinced that this is the kind of thing I could never, ever do without feeling as if I am someone who should crawl under a rock and never come out. It’d be all my high school horrors and nightmares turned into a shiny new internet experience, and just another step down the aesthetic Darwinism trail that is the internet’s video-centric social media whirl.
It should be pointed out, however, that I am not the most future-forward of internet users; I remember, in my old job, taking a meeting about Second Life, back when Second Life was starting out – We did work for a futurist organization, so we were getting early heads-up on a lot of stuff like that at the time – and thinking “That sounds fascinating and awesome!” An attitude that lasted until I actually logged on to Second Life and discovered that it was, instead, frustrating and unworkable. So maybe I’m not the best person to judge whether or not chatroulette is the new Facebook (Another site I rarely, if ever, check: Sorry, people who are waiting for me to approve their Friend’s Requests!), but still. If nothing else, I’d like to think that the future of the internet would have a name that wouldn’t include the word “roulette.”
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