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Sunday, February 28, 2010

A Brief History of Humanity

I learned about it from a recent podcast. It’s a website called ChatRoulette.com. It considers itself a kind of game but really it’s an absurdity. And yet, oh such potential it has. The page opens with a simple chat room layout. At the bottom left you see a little window showing yourself, above it is a black square. When you’re ready you press the “play” button and the black screen opens into an image of a random stranger. The site is pure anonymity; in the chatroom portion the names listed are only “you” and “stranger”. You talk to the person if you want and, if not, you press the “next” button and are paired with another random stranger from somewhere else in the world. You can talk with anyone about anything. It is the very best of the medium, it is why the internet was created. You can connect with people from all over the world, people just like you, to talk. To meet, to discuss, to argue, to perform, to do anything in the whole world. That, however, is merely what it should be for.
I spent the last week trying to figure out what, in fact, it actually is for. The first thing you’ll notice is that most people don’t wait around long to talk to you. The window opens up, connecting you with this stranger and, in my experience, they will give you a disgusted look and then the screen will return to black. You have been skipped. That accounts for about 80% of the people you’ll find on ChatRoulette. About 5% will be a piece of paper covering the screen saying something along the lines of “Show me your boobs!” Usually with more grammatical and spelling errors. Another 5% are completely blank, something either without a webcam or simply hiding themselves for whatever reason. About 5% are men masturbating. Yes, men masturbating on camera, usually only showing their penis. To what aim one would want to do this I truly don’t understand. Is the arousal simply in showing one’s genitals anonymously to the world? I mean this isn’t a kind of sex chat, no one is going to talk to this person masturbating, nor can they be expected to talk back while doing so. So what’s the point? Perhaps it is simply to ruin the experience for everyone else. That leaves only a handful of people that will actually stop and talk to you. During a score of hours over the last five days I had real discussions with maybe seven different people, none lasted more than half an hour. In the end, what conclusion could I possibly come up with? Clearly people weren’t on there for the same reason as me, otherwise they would’ve talked to me as I would’ve talked to them. So then why are they there? The best answer I can come up with that encompasses the most people would be, simply, boredom. They were bored and a friend had told them about this weird site called ChatRoulette.com so they decided to check it out and were, probably, disappointed by it.
But that brings me to a second point, which is, in fact, the more important. ChatRoulette simply makes up the best and the worst that the internet has to offer. It’s a great example of how the internet has changed the world of social interaction for the better and for the worse. On the positive side we are now in a world that has shrunk to miraculously small proportions. Never before has it been so easy to connect with wholly random people from across the globe. More importantly, never before has it been so very easy to realize that the other people in the world are just like you. These people aren’t mysterious foreigners, they’re not enemies, they’re not backwards or uncivilized or heathen or godless. They’re just like you. They’re even on the same dumb ass website as you. And yet instead of making us all feel part of the same global community, it has turned us all into strangers. It has made us all entirely unexceptional and entirely uninteresting to one another. This is the part where I go into my rant against facebook.
Facebook, like chatroulette, encompasses the best and the worst of the internet age. It has allowed us to stay connected with old friends, to rediscover relatives and classmates, to share information with people from every stage of our lives at once. And yet it has made us all inactive. It has made us passive in the dissemination of information about ourselves. There is little need for discussing anything with one another once we’ve posted it on Facebook. It’s up there for the world to see, so why would you need to say it to someone? Facebook has given us hundreds and hundreds of friends whom we never have to speak to again. When you have this many friends what reason could there possibly be to make any actual friends? When you’re friends with everyone you know on facebook, it places everyone you know on an equal level. Your relatives, your old classmates, and your best friend since 1st grade, they all get the same view of you. You present yourself to the whole world in exactly the same way, no matter how well or how little you know them. With things like chatroulette, facebook, twitter, we have more connections with more people than anyone ever in the history of the world. And yet, with so many connections, they are all more shallow, more meaningless than ever before. Our friendships have suffered at the expense of having more friendships.

I recently came to the sobering and disturbing realization that what I had thought were my very best friendships were in fact friendships of locale. Anyone who has experienced a localized friendship(s) knows that in a relatively short amount of time we can make incredibly close connections with others through concentrated time in close proximity. For examples see any kind of retreat or trip where you spend all your time with the same people. We may feel closer to those people than any of our long-time friends and yet as soon as the proximity is taken away we may never think of them again. My last couple years at university were like an extended version of this experience. And so it is that I thought that friendships of locale were actually deeper than they were. This first occurred to me while I was living in DC. Despite being at the lowest, most painful point in my life there were very few friends who were willing to talk to me. Even less were willing to actually reach out and make contact with me. None were willing to do anything drastic or serious to help me in anyway. Now you’re probably thinking, “Chris, you can’t expect anyone to drop everything and come out to DC to come see you and make sure you’re alright.” To which I would reply, “I absolutely expect friends to be able to do that.” Perhaps I take too serious an approach to friendship and what it means to be a friend but I’m of the opinion that friends would do absolutely anything for friends and that absolutely includes doing stupid things for one another. And another thing, friends should never have to ask how friends are doing. Friends should never have to ask if or how they can help. As a friend it is your job to know.

When I returned home in December I received a warm and caring reception from many of these same people that, in DC, I had felt abandoned me. Okay, I thought, it must have been my paranoia making me think my friends didn’t care. I returned to my alma mater and was touched by how much people told me that they cared about me. Fast forward a month and we’re back to square one. My absence as a presence on campus has taken me out of the friendship awareness of most people. When I cross the mind of a friend they think “Oh how nice would it be to do something with Chris,” but they are too busy. Now don’t get me wrong, I know what it’s like to be a student, especially those who are seniors, I know how stressful it can be and so I don’t blame you for living your busy life. But it means that we’re not the friends that I thought we were. Friends make time for friends. They just do. I made time for people even when I least had time to spend towards fun and that’s because I considered them my real friends.

So to all of you out there who find yourself in this position, and I won’t say it because I think you know who you are, I’m sorry that our friendship was one of locale and not of a deeper permanence. I hope you know that this doesn’t lessen what we had together and it doesn’t mean that we won’t still hang out, we won’t still be friends. Not at all, this is simply an awareness on my part that we weren’t what I thought we were and that’s ok. To truly understand anything we have to call it by what it is. To understand my relationships with my friends I have to realize that they’re only a little bit friends and not big serious friends. I can better live my life with all of you knowing the proper relationship that we share.

I honestly hope that no one is offended or upset by any of this. It in no way diminishes my opinion of you, I think of it merely as a reclassification of what we are. We are friends in the age of facebook and of chatroulette. We are friends of an instant. We are friends of simple connections and as we spread apart in life those connections will slowly fade away. We are victims of the times. In another age perhaps we would have been more, perhaps you would’ve written me a letter. Or perhaps we would never have known each other. We are friends because of the best and the worst of our age.

I look at all these pictures and I just think, Who the fuck are these people? Even those that I know, I don't really know. They are just faces and memories, nothing more.

1 comment:

  1. I'm going to see it tonight and I am so effing excited!!

    ReplyDelete