The Newest T.M.I. Experience

Written by RJ Williams

Ever since George Orwell's novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, was published, we've all been nervously on the lookout for "Big Brother" watching over our shoulders. Privacy has become a real issue in many developed countries. So, it's truly ironic that, since the dawning of the Internet, online social networks have made divulging private information for the world to see a not only mandatory but voluntary!

The latest craze to come out of this new "T.M.I. Society" is Chatroulette, a web service that allows users to chat one-on-one with random people using webcam, text, or microphone (or sometimes all three). Created by Russian high school student, Andrey Ternovskiy, the Skype-based interface went viral in late-2009, and once it fell into the collective consciousness of web-surfing celebrities, the floodgates opened. Indeed, the initial appeal to the Average Joe Internet user was the possibility of landing a conversation with a famous personality.

But, as with all good ideas, Chatroulette has quickly faced its share of internet "trolls" who use the site for their own, ahem, deviant purposes. Perhaps it is unavoidable "" for every truly imaginative and entertaining video on YouTube, there are at least fifty videos best left in the Didn't Need To Know file on your desktop. Thus Chatroulette has seemingly become the butt of every topical internet joke these days. It even has it's own meme site, The Art of Trolling (fair warning though: it includes a lot of NSFW content!).

No matter what, the appeal and popularity of the site cannot be denied. Who knows, perhaps one day the Chatroulette experience will become as second-nature to us as Facebooking or internet dating! I guess it all depends on how much of yourself you are really willing to reveal. Perhaps we have all become our own "Big Brother"" ¦

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