I recently found an interesting (not that recent but still topical) video about Chatroulette that could be connected to one of the themes in the course, sexuality and internet culture.
Screen shot from movie
The video got me thinking that Chatroulette in many ways can be comparable with ICQ and IRC (that some of you may have used or remember). Now with Facebook, Google+ and a lot of other social media (far from all though) you are very much in control of who you choose to chat with. In Chatroulette there is chaos. But in this chaos there seem to be the same social norms as can be seen in other settings.
The video maker is talking about boys, girls and perverts, and he is also doing come quantitative work counting Chatrouletters and nexting time. But it would also be interesting to look how gender is performative in chatroulette. What do the users do? How do they do gender?
Another interesting thing would be to study sexuality in Chatroulette, maybe by using Gayle Rubin’s wheel diagram. In the beginning of this blog post I mentioned that there seem to be the same social norms here as can be seen in other settings. But while having Gayle Rubin’s wheel diagram (from the just in time assignment) is it so? And if this isn’t the case, can it be related to nexting?