21stcenturyed.com

Bigfoot Wants to Chat With You!

Today I had an actual conversation with a real live person on Chatroulette. I’ve checked this website out a few times since hearing about it online and in the news. Essentially, it is a game of Russian roulette played with webcams. You start the game and are then connected to another user’s webcam at random. If you (and they) like what you see you can chat. If not, you click “next” (or they do) and it’s off to the next random stranger.
As you can imagine, there’s a lot of “nexting” going on, expecially when you are a boring, fully-clothed, overweight 40 year-old man like me. I don’t take it personally. But it seemed to me to be rather worthless except for the seedier uses of the site.
Today, I thought I’d try one more time to get someone to actually chat. I pointed the camera at paper signs I made with different comments like “Billions of dollars to create the Internet for this?!?” and “Is this everything you hoped it would be?” Many nexted me. But finally a young guy stopped and started to type to me, asking to show my face. Assuming this was going in a not family-friendly direction, I typed back that he didn’t want to see me as I was a 40-year old guy. He replied that he wanted to chat, but didn’t want to chat to a piece of paper. So I turned the webcam to face myelf and started typing away.
It turns out that he is a 17 year old guy from Germany, living on his own and just finishing his last year of secondary school. We chatted for a bit about Chatroulette and shared some funny YouTube links. Then I excused myself to go back to work.
So – maybe Chatroulette isn’t ALL sketchy characters looking for the equivalent of the electronic one-night stand. But I think there’s probably better ways to meet new people. Having an actual conversation (at least as a 40-year old using the tool) seems rather elusive.