The Weird World of Chatroulette

Have you heard of Chatroulette? Of course you have, in fact it seems everyone around me has tried this open chat network through which anyone with an internet connection and a webcam can interact live with…well, everyone else. An endless sequence of strangers, “the whole of humanity at the click of a mouse” a friend said to me the other day.

It’s a new age of communications; it completely redefines the concept of space. Well I wouldn’t want to miss out on so exciting an innovation. So I tried to forget my unfortunate initial encounter, in which the first image on my screen turned out to be a young man doing what his predecessors only did in their bedroom closets or in a bathroom with the door locked, and I decided to give Chatroulette a chance.

The site is accessible without username or password, leaving its users anonymous. Press ‘Start’ and a window pops up: “chatroulette.com is requesting access to your camera and microphone. If you click Allow, you may be recorded”. Well that’s a little intrusive to start with, I think I’d rather just observe the action that is already unfolding in the upper left corner. A man, staring blankly into space. User disconnected…reconnecting… A girl, looking bored. User disconnected…reconnecting… Oops, another exhibitionist! As I desperately click the ‘Next’ button, I’m beginning to feel a little sick. Maybe it would help if I tried the actual chat thing: somewhat reluctantly I ‘allow’ access, but disable my webcam right away. Baby steps.

Flicking through the faces like the pages of Real People magazine, I finally come across a girl whose eyes haven’t yet glazed over from prolonged inertia and type a tentative ‘hey’. Barely 30 seconds have lapsed by the time she’s told me this is “so much fun”, that she’s bored, and that judging from the lack of visuals I’m providing I must be some “really ugly dude”, and then: User disconnected…reconnecting…

If this experience has redefined anything, it’s my understanding of the word tedious. This isn’t a mosaic of humanity, it’s a video collection of the world’s biggest procrastinators doing what comes most naturally to them: nothing. In the best-case scenario. “You don’t do it to meet people”, my friend reassured me and added, “I’m addicted”.

Well alright, in theory it’s a fascinating development away from the era of MSN and the advent of emoticons that helped spotty teenagers with stage fright to declare their love for one another from the security and comfort of their own desks. No more virtual relationships, no more sentimental acronyms (my personal pet peeve in that domain was HH for ‘holding hands’: the cringe-factor just goes through the roof). Only exchanging fragments of everyday life and moving on, perpetually forward to the next moment so that your experience, and you, doesn’t disappear into the collective amnesia.

Yet something continues to perplex me: if this new form of virtual interaction is no longer about meeting people, what is there? Some kind of mutually consented voyeurism, where exhibitionist meets peeping Tom in a constantly renewed series of anonymous encounters with virtually no significance? Anonymity combined with absolute visibility, perpetually repeated with an almost mechanical regularity…well, wasn’t Warhol quite the modern prophet! I believe I’m going to have to disagree with my friend’s initial statement: the entire concept of Chatroulette has little to do with a new form of humanism. On the contrary, it’s the process of depersonalization pushed to the extreme. The user publishes nothing but a manufactured image that loses its connection to the author in the same instant as it enters the network’s public arena. And in a way this is the most exact manifestation of the nature of virtual transactions that I have witnessed to date.

The only remaining problem then is that of the relationship between the users of Chatroulette and the images they produce. A certain level of dissociation always occurs between a person and the product of their creativity: actors, writers, and artists in general systematically experience it. The difference is that what these people produce will usually be reflected back to them by an audience and thus recover some personal relation to its author. In the world of Chatroulette images are projected only against other images, and what is published is lost, permanently cut off from the person who produced it. The implications of this are yet to be observed, and I’m not one to say whether the outcome will be positive. What I can say is that attention must be drawn to the somewhat schizophrenic aspect involved in the process: not everyone is an artist, but now everyone is producing images. So everyone must learn to handle it.

In the end, the main thing we should repeat to ourselves over and over with regard to Chatroulette in the same way as with Facebook, Twitter, etc., is that everything we publish is, inevitably, public. And to all of those concerned: please, stop touching yourselves. That’s just visual assault.