Looking for Friend – Chat Roulette Sign Experiment
Remember my old Chat Roulette videos? Well, I’m going to try to get back into them. For those that haven’t seen the old ones, here are links to them:
I attempted to do another experiment in which I held up a sign that said “Looking for Friend – Make a heart if you will be one.” This was inspired by the idea that Emile Durkheim brought up regarding Egoistic Suicides. The concept was that someone that didn’t feel as integrated into society would be likely to commit suicide. Past thoughts of those kids from Columbine, and the Virginia Tech shooter came back into mind when I realized, yeah, maybe they weren’t just “Crazy” like the mass population would deem them. Like anyone else, they wanted to be part of society, but due to what society would label as their “implications”, they weren’t as widely accepted.
Internet society is one very different than the physical society that you and I interact in when we go to school, or go eat food, or hang out with friends. It’s definitely a lot more hostile, but interaction to the individual, will still be interaction. Depending on the community, I’m sure results would differ, seeing as if I walked around La Verne with the same sign hung around my neck, one of the last things that would happen would probably be being flipped off. However, the middle finger in the case of the social being, is probably just as demeaning as being laughed at or looked at funny.
In the following data, you will see a rough sketch of what a generalized Chat Roulette community consists of. I held up the sign, and took marks of numbers based on the reactions of the individual, or in other cases, groups on camera. This data is very, very broad – with the numbers being generated from the overall perspective. This means I didn’t factor in whether or not the individual was in a group or alone, what ethnicity or age the agents were, or the ordinal level of hostility if they had insulted me.
166/200 were 1′s, meaning that 83% of the people on Chat Roulette completely disregarded my call out to them. They either skipped the moment they saw me, or stopped and read the sign, then skipped.
15/200 were 2′s, meaning that roughly 7% of the people on Chat Roulette had insulted me in a certain way. The primary insults I took were the middle finger, the laughing at me then skipping, and the shaking of the head with the eye roll. Some even made the heart, then displayed a broken heart with a middle finger after. These were also recorded.
19/200 were 3′s, meaning roughly 9% of the people on Chat Roulette had complied with the message and made a heart, whether typed, or with their hands.
Again, this is a very broad, and general data spread. I also wish I could do the video, but I highly doubt that the people “surveyed” would like to be labeled as the one that insulted me, or the one that skipped over me, so it’s probably not the best idea to do one anyway. I might honestly continue to develop this idea, and somehow bring it onto Facebook. For now, we can see that the internet society, particular to Chat Roulette, is one of a very individualistic type. Many showed no empathy, or desire to be a part of the life of another in even the simplest of ways.
With that, I leave you with the closing statement to Michael Moore’s “Bowling for Columbine”:
(In a conversation with Marilyn Manson)
Moore: If you were to talk directly to the kids at Columbine, or the people in that community, what would you say to them right now?
Manson: I wouldn’t say a single word to them, I would listen to what they have to say, and that’s what no one did.
PS: Again, I do plan on refining this more – consider it a rough draft of a grander experiment.
