Chat Roulette Killed My Blogging Steez

Originally published in full on The Vine
To experience Chat Roulette, click here

So, I keep a Word Doc entitled ‘Writing-WIP.doc’ open at all times. This is where I write my weekly blog posts. During the course of the week I type bits Here and There, usually culminating in a collection of words I deem suitable to post.

However, this week was different. I was introduced to ChatRoulette.com. I am not very good at explaining things, but basically, it is a place where you video-chat with strangers/their penises. They are sometimes (often) masturbating.

Every time I started writing some paragraphs, I’d get a nervous feeling in my stomach. I’m not sure, but I’m pretty sure this feeling was telling me:

You are about to minimise the Microsoft Word window.
You will open a new Firefox tab.
You will type www.chatroulette.com, then hit enter.
You will spend at least 20 minutes here.
Your feelings will be kind of hurt when dudes give you an annoyed look, then cut you off.
Your most meaningful interaction will be when you exchange corresponding East Coast/West Coast hand gestures with a white guy wearing undies and a motorbike helmet.
You will, briefly, wish that you were a hot chick.

This process was repeated at least twice every night from Tuesday to Friday. Each time I came back to the story I was writing, the weight of the online world had crushed me, I could not continue.

Now…

I’m not either naïve nor clever enough to have a definitive opinion on the latest(ish) social network ‘thing’ (excluding Buzz, I s’pose). The only thing I’m certain of is the enormous amount of annoying existential outcry/debate that will be generated.

These will be divided into many categories, which I will generalise into two:

1. Earnest bloggers/thinkers who get all academic and web 2.0 about everything.

These people range from a little bit tiresome, to a little bit The Worst. Their articles always have those full-sentence titles with terms like ‘Debunking’ and ‘Unpacking Communities’ and colons and semi-colons and shit.

Alain de Botton will Tweet about how everything is pretty sad but also pretty not sad too. Everyone will agree.

Furious discussion will rage in the New Media until Chat Roulette is deemed mainstream and boring, which is usually the exact day the SMH run a story about it.


2. On the other end of the spectrum is the dismissive ‘get a life’ types. They refuse to do Twitter ‘cos it’s 'just like Facebook statuses' - Chat Roulette doesn't stand a chance.

Them: ‘Why would I want to just look at guy's dicks? It’s disgusting.’

Me: ‘Don’t you find it interesting at all? I mean, like, that you are just connected face-to-face with complete strangers?’

Them: ‘I have A LIFE with ACTUAL FRIENDS, I don’t need to talk to look at some psycho on the internet.’

Me: ‘Do I need to debunk this for you again?’



So in conclusion, all I have really said is that the extreme attitudes to Chat Roulette/anything online at either end of the spectrum are annoying... In hindsight, this is not very insightful.

We know nothing more about Chat Roulette or its role in the zeitgeist than we did at the start of this blog post.

There’s only one thing for certain. I’d rather feel nervous all the time and look at internet dicks than watch Good News Week. I mean, what a bunch of dicks fuckwits, right?