Virtual Street Corners: ChatRoulette +

This article in today's Boston Globe discusses a project where folks on the street in two different locations -- Brookline's Coolidge Corner and Boston's Dudley Square -- can live chat via video and audio:

Everette Linton Jr., a photographer who had been playing chess in Dudley Square, did a double take Wednesday as he passed the screen. He stopped, excitedly grabbed the microphone, and yelled into it: “Anybody out there?’’

A man selling newspapers in Coolidge Corner wandered into his view. “I’m working,’’ the man said. “You got to wait for somebody to come by.’’

The project is the brainchild of artist and activist James Ewing as a way for these two neighborhoods with shared histories but generations of cultural isolation to connect.

“We were the first black family on the street,’’ he said. “My mother just had her 50th reunion. She graduated from the [Jeremiah E.] Burke [High School]. She was one of only three black kids who were there. In fact, the reunion was in Brookline. Now, I don’t think there’s one white kid in that school.’’

In a way, this project is not unlike ChatRoulette: you're on your end of the monitor, and you have no idea who will wander by. Conversations are likely conducted by strangers, there's no commitment to engage, and there's no penalty for walking away.

But it's unlike ChatRoulette in some important ways:
* it's conducted in two public settings, which will (virtually) eliminate the chance you'll come across a masturbater;
* depending on the location, people on the street are usually there to conduct business, meet friends or are just passing through en route to another engagement. In short, they're generally not hanging around looking for trouble.
* Virtual Street Corners links two neighborhoods with a shared history and enough exoticism to draw people in. It's not linking, say, Roxbury with Middleborough, though I suppose if you dig deep enough you can find links between any two locations.
* Virtual Street Corners will feature "regular programming", local news presented by correspondents in both locations. Ewing hopes that this will help cut down on the more shallow, chatty conversations, like the correspondent above who discussed his mother's experience growing up in Roxbury.

All that being said, it's probably good that the project is set to run for only two weeks. School's still in session, curtailing gaggles of teens dominating the chat. And it should take awhile before the curious and/or the destructive get ahold of the technology.