Blog #3

For this assignment I decided I was gonna make the jump into the world of ChatRoulette. I figured that the whole idosing thing was probably a bit unrealistic, and even if it did work it wasn't really something I was interested in trying out. So this weekend, in my hotel room in Dallas. Yes, I went to the Super Bowl, yes it was awesome, and yes I brought that up with the sole purpose of letting everybody know I was able to see the Packers become world champions again in person (Welcome Back Vince!). Now back to my experience with ChatRoulette. After about 15 minutes of trying to explain to my dad what exactly I was doing, and why I would want to do it I finally hopped onto the site. I proceeded to get nexted about 15 times in a row (I didn't think I was that scary looking, must be the scraggly beard...) Then finally I got into a pretty decent conversation with a girl from London. She was pretty cool, and we had a decent conversation about each other, she seemed pretty interested when I told her that I was on for a class assignment, however shortly after that she unexpectedly nexted me. It was a heartbreaking moment, but I managed to get over it pretty quickly. I spent about the next 10 minutes dealing with a mixture of "hey whats up" "nothing you" conversations and just plain getting old getting nexted immediately, before I finally gave up on this whole meeting strangers thing. I had reached my conclusion on the site.
Based on some previous experience along with my time spent on this weekend, its really only an enjoyable experience when you are with multiple people. The fun in meeting another large group of people, maybe finding some sort of common ground, or even maybe meeting someone that's in your vicinity is a tantalizing prospect. However from my experience, it seems to me like its usually just a lot of people hoping they will find their ideal chat partner, even though that is a pretty unlikely occurence. This results in a lot of nexting, and ultimately a lot of waiting and people being disappointed that this game of roulette didn't pay off for them.