Post #3

I chose to go on chatroulette.com. I was legitimately nervous to go on such a notoriously shady website but I figured this assignment would be a good enough excuse to at least try it once. Chatroulette is simply all about patience. You have to be willing to go through countless shirtless men cruising for babes and of course the occasional penis which is tremendously demoralizing. However, through the sex solicitations and the stoned frat boys, I actually met a couple fascinating people. I was on Chatroulette for about twenty minutes and had three conversations. All of them were with, supposedly, women. I say "supposedly" because I am relatively certain that one of them was just a looped video of a woman that was soliciting for sex. So that leaves me with two legitimate encounters. The first was with a girl name Yan from China. She was extremely nice and even picked up her adorable little sister to wave to me. I talked to Yan for about five to ten minutes and left with a renewed confidence in the possibilities of Chatroulette. The second person I met was a woman named Anna from Germany. She was a bit more eccentric but a pleasant person nonetheless.

Chatroulette has a largely negative reputation and has become the punch line to just about every joke concerning the internet. This is not without grounds of course, the nudity and profanity can attest to that. But I have to say, regardless of its obvious pitfalls, I found myself wanting to keep going. I even caught myself off guard when I realized I had been on the site for about an hour (yeah I know I said 20 mins earlier but I didn't want to sound crazy right off the bat). Chatroulette illustrated some of its potential in the conversations I had with complete strangers, despite their infrequency. It is noteworthy that Chatroulette has taken steps towards tightening its privacy concerns but there is still the fundamental problem of people being unpredictable. Unless they employ some sort of username system that can keep perpetrators from being able to return, Chatroulette will continue to be seriously flawed. And if they did enact such a system, it would take away from the accessibility of the entire concept. It literally took me five seconds to start chatting, something that other social networking websites cannot beat. So all in all, Chatroulette has some glaring deficiencies but the potential is there, now it is just a matter of domesticating it to the point of being a serious contender in the realm of social networking and not simply circus sideshow.