a continuation: chat roullette

This article easily much better written and as such emotionally moving where the other was merely interesting. This article, truly fascinating. Basically any article that involves analyzing psychologies behind online movements are pretty interesting. This particular articles takes a very different stance, or at least one I've never read before. He argues that twitter, facebook, chatroulette provide a distinctly human experience. I believe the more prevalent argument offered is that these sites take away from the human self by providing fake worlds where you can create a separate online persona.

I entered the fray on a bright Wednesday afternoon, with an open mind and an eager soul, ready to sound my barbaric yawp through the webcams of the world. I left absolutely crushed. It turns out that ChatRoulette, in practice, is brutal. The first eighteen people who saw me disconnected immediately. They appeared, one by one, in a box at the top of my screen—a young Asian man, a high-school-age girl, a guy lying on his side in bed—and, every time, I’d feel a little flare of excitement. Every time, they’d leave without saying a word. Sometimes I could even watch them reach down, in horrifying real-time, and click “next.” It was devastating.

This, to me, doesn't seem any less real than any other experience just, like he said, more efficient. Enough rejection to fill your entire High School experience in 30 seconds.

As Internet culture has grown, we’ve come to romanticize certain kinds of unmediated, old-fashioned “human” interactions. But this fantasy ignores how much of normal social interaction is fleeting, bite-size, instant, tweetlike. Humans have always talked to each other via a kind of analog Twitter. These new technologies just get us there with maximum efficiency.

Sam Anderson provides a perceptive and seemingly loving account for the oddity and realness of these fake worlds, arguing that they are no different than any other interaction just more efficient.