Loneliness and the long-distance Chatrouletter

Image by Dan Phiffer via Flickr

Here it is, my second post about Chatroulette and I have to start with a confession: I’m really not that interested in Chatroulette. Sure, it’s getting lots of press (e.g., NY Times, Wall Street Journal, and the AP). And the pull to play has been irresistible. But I’ve gotten my fill of the fun one can get from stumbling into brief exchanges with a depressed German girl who hates the Berlin club scene or rooms full of adolescent boys hooping and hollering, not to mention the countless others who take one look at my greying beard and Next me more quickly than Clint Eastwood playing the Man with No Name could draw.

But don’t go by me, I don’t even like to channel surf, an activity sort of like Chatroulette if you add to surfing some early-Internet random chat-room excitement. The fact is lots of people find lots of fun playing it online. Groups gather to play communally; drinking games like chatroulette-bingo have popped up;  and researchers, like the Web Ecology Project and comScore, a digital marketing research company, are starting to drill down into usage patterns. Clearly, there’s a phenomenon here worth some attention, however personally tired of it I might have become.

And if you haven’t tried it yourself, or if you’re caught in spirals of moral panic about seeing an exposed penis (which you will probably see if you spend any time at all), take a look at Merton the hoodie-wearing piano improv guy, and watch some of the related videos as well. Total fun.

What is fascinating, even more than emerging demographic patterns skewing towards 18-24 year old males, is why Chatroulette is any fun at all.  Why is it fun to connect with people on a platform that pretty much guarantees that you will never have a lasting connection with someone else?

If this has legs, and I think it or something like it will, that “why question” will surely launch numerous dissertations and research grants. But even now we can begin thinking through the psychology of Chatroulette to see how cleverly the design exploits two powerful psychological realities: our need for connection and our fears of connection.

We need connection, we are instrinsically social beings. But we don’t just crave connection, we need it like oxygen and nutrition. In the classic (and disturbing to watch) experiment with monkeys, Harry Harlow showed that infant monkeys will seek warmth and comfort rather than food:

In fact, without connection we would suffer and die or go crazy (like that poor monkey who appears at the end of the short video).

In addition to craving/needing connection, many experiences are only possible because they happen in the plural, they require the presence of other people. Intimacy, recognition, and validation are like all experiences that are only possible when connected to other people. Games like bingo can only be played with other people; you need an audience to perform; you need a performer to be entertained; and, of course, getting at the content of the moral panic sweeping my generation, every act of exhibitionism needs a viewer and voyeurism  requires someone to watch. We need each other.

But connecting to other people always has a cost. You have to open up and make yourself vulnerable to someone else; maybe this other person will criticize or ignore rather than recognize or validate. Maybe someone else just doesn’t want play your game or watch you perform or perform for you as an audience. Sometimes we have to invest some self and show others what we want, and sometimes we don’t get any return and we lose. Connection always has a cost.

And what CR does is provide a way to gratify the first need while minimizing the risks of the second. You don’t have to invest much self to get the fun (the connection) it provides. On CR you just press Next at the first sign of any anxiety and off you go to your next encounter. It’s a potentially zipless encounter.

CR is fun because it gives a relatively risk-free way to feel, at least for a moment, something we all want (need!) to feel: connected to other people who are doing the same kind of thing we are doing.