Not News (but Good to Be Reminded): The Internet Is for Wankers

The Internet has had many inflection points related to the transmogrification of human behavior. The latest what the hell? instance could be Chatroulette.

If the Internet is about the democratization of self-expression, then this is a pure form. It reduces all of the desperate and determined desire to be seen and heard and acknowledged to its essence.

Surveying the 16-year commercial history of the Internet, it might fairly be that this is what it comes down to.

The great struggle to normalize the medium, to pay no attention to what actually is going on behind the curtain, to stress what about it is good for all mankind, is rather hoisted on its own petard.

Chatroulette takes that most prosaic of Internet genres--chatting with strangers--and adds video to it. Odd that it took so long for someone to think of this. Cue, for the last time, the old New Yorker cartoon--from the days when people who read the New Yorker could speak condescendingly about such thing as chat rooms--about no one knowing if you're a dog on the Internet. Chatroulette is a form of speed dating in which a real-time figure appears on your screen (and you on his) who can be accepted or rejected, allowing you to move immediately on to the next. Chatroulette, which introduces (well, sort of introduces) people from diverse countries--even those in autocratic (and sexually repressed) lands, where Chatroulette does not seem to have been blocked yet--finds what curiously seems to be a common human interest.

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