ChatRoulette spins me round like record right round...

Over at the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning blog, danah boyd posted a piece about ChatRoulete, which I just mentioned in my last post. I found myself pontificating about this hot new phenomenon, and thought I'd share my wicked insightful comments with you, the reader(s). This post makes a lot more sense after you read the initial piece by danah.

Hi, danah. I understand that ChatRoulette is not the devil incarnate, but I don't think it's quite an accessible public, either. When you cite your positive experiences from over a dozen years ago, a few things come to mind:

* the web as a public resource was still very much in its infancy, and there wasn't, for better or for worse, the same range of online participants. Academics, radicals, and scientists, mostly.

* Similarly, who's primarily on ChatRoulette? Are there statistics on participation? My ad hoc assessment is that it's skewered towards youth and boys. Do you think your thoughtful transgender friend would play CR with the hopes of lucking into someone s/he could dialogue with on a meaningful level? Or might s/he be a participant in a more formal community?

* I don't think CR participants are looking for those types of conversations. How might the immediate, easy-in, easy-out affordances and (might I suggest) expectations of ChatRoulette map to the meaningful conversations you found? There are more efficient ways of finding those people to talk to online.

* The smut is unfortunate, but no less so than offline, where strangers hump you on the subway and expose themselves to you in the park. In a way, perhaps it's positive "de-sensitivity training" for young girls who will most likely encounter some of this later on, and should learn how to laugh and point. : )

* CR is the idea of dialing up strangers for entertainment -- you claim for elucidation, but I'm not buying. It's the digital equivalent of a prank phone call, except with costumes and multimedia. That one might be able to extract more meaning out of it than that is about as likely as using the internet randomizer and hoping to happen upon a webpage that's aligned at all to your interests.

* So really, it's thrillseeking teens. Nothing new there.