ChatRoulette is one of the newest social networking sites to hit the Internet. Its growing popularity is making it a topic of many conversations. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, users do not communicate through messages. Rather, ChatRoulette users talk to one another with the help of web cameras.
Oh, and users communicate with complete strangers.
In the “New York” magazine article, The Human Shuffle: Is ChatRoulette the Future of the Internet or its distant past, the article discusses how ChatRoulette is a cross between Skype and web chatting. It also refers to it as the “anti Facebook” and an example of a “pure media shuffle.”
The site is pretty simple to use. Users go on the website and are randomly connected to other people via webcam. A user can chose to talk to another user with the webcam or to send instant messages. If a user decides he or she does not want to continue talking to the person her or she is currently chatting with, the user can hit the “next” button and is faced with a different user.
Users are supposed to be at l6 years of age. However, when a person logs in, there is no way to verify whether a person is of age or not. Conceivably, 13 year olds can log into this site. This is rather a frightening thought considering some of the things that people do on this site.
I had my first experience with ChatRoulette last Tuesday. My roommates and I wanted to see what all of the hype was about. We logged on and found ourselves in a chat with a man and a woman in the middle of having sex with one another. We could not believe what we were witnessing. When they finished doing the deed, the couple came up to the camera and asked us if we enjoyed the show. We were nauseated and decided to hit the “next” button to find a new user to chat with.
After hitting the next button after seeing users who were either not of age or who insisted on showing us their male genitalia, we were met with two young men who claimed to be in their 20’s from Florida. We spoke to them for about 45 minutes. The four of us gave them fake names and told them we attended school in Boston, not Albany. They kept asking for our phone numbers and we repeatedly gave them the numbers of Time Warner Cable and various pizzerias.
I think ChatRoulette gives online predators an entirely new meaning. Since there is no way to verify how old a person really is, anyone can go on. There is also no way to stop people from getting naked or doing things such as having sex on camera. When will there be a crackdown on this website? Will ChatRoulette be another social networking fad or is it here to stay?
WordsFromAmanda 
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