As Internet culture has grown, we’ve come to romanticize certain kinds of unmediated, old-fashioned “human” interactions. But this fantasy ignores how much of normal social interaction is fleeting, bite-size, instant, tweetlike. Humans have always talked to each other via a kind of analog Twitter. These new technologies just get us there with maximum efficiency. Meeting a new person is thrilling, in a primal way—your attention focuses completely, if only for a nanosecond, to see if the creature in front of you has the power to change your life for better or worse. ChatRoulette creates this moment over and over again; it privileges it over actual conversation. Eventually, I realized that clicking “next” was not so much a rejection as it was pure curiosity, like riding a train past an apartment building at night, looking briefly into as many lit windows as possible.
Is ChatRoulette the Future of the Internet or Its Distant Past? New York Magazine (via somethingchanged)
Chat Roulette is everything social media wishes it could be. It’s reckless abandon, it’s visceral, it’s saying “fuck it” to 140 characters and all the bullshit status updates from your asshole bosses and friends with newborns and pulling your dick out or shaking your ass doing whatever you can to captivate or entertain in the one-second timeframe before someone can NEXT your ass, it’s the opposite of a filtered, calculated online identity. And a lot of dicks and asses too.
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