The renowned sociologist Erving Goffman once said that “a conversation has a life of its own and makes demands on its own behalf. It is a little social system with its own boundary-maintaining tendencies; it is a little patch of commitment and loyalty with its own heroes and its own villains.” This quotation struck a chord with me a few weeks ago, as, for the first time, I navigated the treacherous waters of chatroulette. For those struggling to keep up with the pace of the zeitgeist, chatroulette is an internet programme that allows users the possibility of having a video chat with any other user, anywhere else in the world, at random.

Chatroulette bucks a growing trend - namely, the refinement and tailoring of an ever more personalised internet experience. On facebook, we only see updates from our friends; on Twitter, only those that we follow appear on our homepage; and our RSS feeds receive news from a finely tuned collection of websites and blogs. Such constant refinement is part of a wider process that seeks high levels of personalisation in all areas of consumer life: if I like my coffee grande, iced, with an extra shot of espresso and 2% milk on the side, you can bet my internet browsing will be just as fussy.

Goffman’s sociology is deeply concerned with the rules that govern social life: when we buy a coffee, go to the doctor, or studiously ignore the homeless person on the street, an intricate order with scripted interchanges is ritually applied, one that is based on context and roles. You wouldn’t, for example, ask your doctor for a Grande macchiato to go, or ask a homeless guy to diagnose your rash. Chatroulette is the very opposite of this: occupying a space that is geographically unlimited and contextless, it does away with the predictability, ritual order and rules associated with most of social life.

For Goffman, social interaction is characterized by heroes and villains on the basis of who accords or fails to accord with the social rules- the villain of the piece being the person who laughs in the face of said rules, such as the tramp who does not play his role properly, and throws the passer-by’s money back in her face.  On chatroulette, in Goffman’s analysis, we are all villains to a greater or lesser degree, breaking the rules of social life by the very fact that, in this virtual reality, no rules apply.

I think it’s telling that, during my first chatroulette experience, one of my first encounters was with a person wearing a mask. Sinister as this was, he took it off to reveal yet another mask underneath, which not only provoked laughter from my housemate and me, but revealed further what makes chatroulette so compelling and so terrifying. Jumping into a social interaction with no context, no defined roles and no rules, we are all equal players of the game, free to define the situation as we see fit and free to present whatever type of front we wish without fear of being found out. We have no idea who is on the other side of the computer screen, and more disturbingly, we can never really know.

Goffman claims that rules, the contracts that govern social life, are necessary because of the fragile nature of social interaction and the social self, over which hangs the threat of constant annihilation.  In throwing away the rulebook and leaving us all to fend for ourselves in the precarious battleground of internet interaction, chatroulette is proof that this annihilation has already begun.

chat roulette from Casey Neistat on Vimeo.