Chatroulette is a website that does one thing: It connects users to live video chats with complete strangers. There's no browsing for partners, no picking and choosing, no filtering out the rude, the nude and the outright bizarre, of which there are plenty. Chatroulette simply picks another anonymous soul who's using the site, and bam: There you are, looking bemusedly at each other across the ether.
This thing is as popular as it is astonishing. University kids gush about it. People drag their housemates on to the site. People sit in coffee shops chatting up random people online instead of the random people next to them.
It seems, at first blush, as nihilistic and void as interactions come. What could possibly be appealing here?
To use Chatroulette is essentially to channel-surf, but with humans. When you stop talking to one person, it automatically connects you to another. It happens so quickly that it takes a moment to realize that you’re actually looking at another person in real time, and that he’s looking back. You look at him, he looks at you, and then, almost invariably …
Click.
One of you changes the channel, and moves on to another partner without saying a word.
Click. The people of Earth start scrolling by. There’s a roomful of emo teenagers. “Where u from,” one types. “Canada,” I type. They flip away. A young man, his face glowing with laptop glare. Click. Another. Click. Naked guy. Click. Some teens in Boston, who accuse me of looking like a teacher then curse me roundly when I refuse to help them with a school paper. Click. Frat boys. “Hey big dawg. What’s upppp?” they type. Click. Click. Click click click. It’s so easy to get discouraged.
A man in a plush tiger suit appears; he looks at me and flips away in disgust.
Live video sites have been around for a while, but most of them have followed a more structured approach, letting users pick and choose who to chat with. I found that experience almost universally hellish; it was like being stuck in an elevator with a series of malignant non-entities, mumbling nothings instead of staying anything. Chatroulette’s innovation is to couple anonymity with an environment in which everybody’s holding a rip cord. Don’t like it? Bail.
The upshot is that Chatroulette users go belting through pairings at such a pace that, almost out of necessity, some kind of interaction emerges out of the murk.
There appears a young man who’s waving a wad of brightly coloured bills. He does this little fan dance for a moment. I pull out a $20 bill and hold it to the camera. His eyes bulge. “YEAH!” he screams. Click.
Naked guy. Naked guy. A woman appears, smiles, flashes me and vanishes. Then two more young women in a dark room in Philadelphia, so all I can see is one’s hat and another’s glasses. They are blasting Michael Jackson. I notice they type in complete sentences; one, it turns out, is a copy editor, and soon we’re talking – about M.J., about snow, about naked people on the Internet and about the feeling of attendant doom that comes from working with words in 2010. This goes on for half an hour. The folks from Philly and I agree that humanity has been redeemed for the night.
It’s familiar. Sometimes, on the street corner, I’ll hear people talking to each other very much like I talk to my friends – with the same idioms, the same tone, the same drawl – and I realize that it was just happenstance that I befriended who I did in this world. Had I shown up at a different place and time, these strangers might have been my closest friends.
On some level, we’re all interchangeable. We have our tribes. You know yours and I know mine.
The next night, I do it all again on Chatroulette. Click, click, click, through the whack jobs and the dullards, the peep shows and the dozens of blank squares. Hilarity, then discouragement, then finally as I’m about to give up, a black square says hello.
Her webcam isn’t working, so there is nothing where her face would be, just a dark box.
“Very mysterious,” I say.
“Slightly,” she says.
The black square says she’s from California, and is a she. I tell her I’ll choose to believe that.
“Most people skip past me because of the whole black box thing,” she says.
We talk of IKEA, and hockey, and what makes a good conversation (specifically, not talking about pets), and pets.
Life is the process of filtering out the people who don’t click, and glomming on to the people that do. What a rush when we find our own! So much of what we’ve tried online in the past decade, from the escapism of virtual worlds to the labours of Facebook, has been an extension of this simple project.
Now we come to the simplest implement of all: whirling through people for that thrill of connection. Chatroulette is life sped up: bewilderment, alienation, drudgery, distraction and redemption – when you find something that clicks.
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