Your partner disconnected

I'm off to hear Arthur Scargill solve the world's problems tonight. In his honour, it's time for a haircut. I'm thinking bias-cut with highl… no, I'm really not. As usual, it'll be a short back and sides, requiring no further thought or attention until next time.

Has anyone tried this ChatRoulette game yet? I toyed with trying it and live-blogging my encounters as a media studies adventure, but realised that I wouldn't have anything to say to anyone who didn't switch me off immediately. I suspect Ewar would enjoy teasing other players.

In case you've missed the fun, it's a game in which you switch on your webcam and get randomly connected to anyone else on the ChatRoulette website. According to reliable journalistic reports, it's mostly naked men who haven't got the hang of courtship, and think that demonstrating that their genitalia work under digital manipulation is a shortcut to romance. It's interesting as a phenomenon, and a predictable result of making the technology available, but I'm not sure that it's going to transform human relations.

If you don't believe me, have a look at these encounters (all safe for work).

It might just work

How do we feel about starting a slow-motion, online book/cultural activity club? We could set up a blog and share the passwords, then agree to read the same book, see the same play or film, listen to the same album or attend concerts by bands or orchestras which are touring the country, then leave our critical judgements on the site. We'd take turns, agree not to suggest anything just to annoy everybody, and steer clear of anything course-related (and I'd promise not to pull rank).

It's just an idle thought - what do you reckon?

All readers, please comment

I just helped out with a Digital Media lecture on social networking sites, which was fascinating. We talked about the various ways SNSs can be conceptualised, their relationship to the public sphere, and the notions of SNSs as loci for performativity.

So: please leave a note on this post (anonymously if you wish) saying whether I a) know you in person, b) consider yourselves my friend, acquaintance, colleague, stalker or other and c) whether you think there's any difference between being an online 'friend' and an offline/real-life friend. Just out of interest.

I realised during this lecture too how many SNSs of which I'm a member. While rejecting Facebook, I'm on three fencing forums including the main British Fencing one, Librarything, Flickr, Academia.edu and several others.