PTASNY.com

My apologies for all of the colons and slashes; I went to a liberal arts school where indulgent use of punctuation was encouraged.*

*not really sorry :)

Anyways…

My attitudes toward both ChatRoulette as well as my own website are admittedly still in their infancy, but articles like: ChatRoulette by Jonah Lehrer at ScienceBlogs.com, led me to lament more about my own website by analyzing what ChatRoulette does and thus, what it can say about the potential (both good and bad) for PTASNY.

I decided that our motto would be “Documenting the characters of public transit and the streets of NYC” to avoid it being inherently exploitative.  I considered a wiki-style of organization, but decided the open-source nature of wiki systems would not only create viable concerns for people’s privacy, but even more counterintuitive, such definitive methods of defining people seems patronizing to the innate accessible nature of public transit that makes the characters so endearing to me.

This also speaks to how interface design can cause services like mine and ChatRoulette to seem more or less likely to be exploited.  I used the multi-source video platform Magnify.net because (while interning there) I realized that curating and controlling content of your own brand is also a way to create a more ethical user base by focusing more on fostering community rather than anonymity.  Nurturing the interactive demand of today’s internet consumer ends up being beneficial on more fronts than just being the go-to place for ______…it helps content providers/aggregators to feel more at peace with the idiom “idle hands are the devil’s tools”.

ChatRoulette (here comes the indulgent liberal arts alum) leads me to lament the ethics of an interface embracing a supermodern sensibility; the user interface is reminiscent of the java-script yahoo chat rooms of yesteryear— which from an interface design perspective, is worrisome.  I can tell the simplistic, bare bones anonymous glory hole aesthetic may cause many to abandon their concerns for privacy.  Already I am finding websites like ChatRoulette Hall of Fame which encourages exploitative use of the site with message board topics such as “How to Get Girls to Show You Their … A compilation of guides to up your Chat Roulette game” followed by a section on “How to Take a Screenshot”.

It really feels like the wild west of the internet again, pre-cyber laws of the early 2000s.  I am very much so for freedom of speech, but I feel the ethics behind interface design need to be challenged in the case of ChatRoulette.   I hope that by making PTASNY as comprehensive as possible will discourage the desire to create unfortunate offshoots that promote abuse of a wonderful idea such as in the case of CR.

In the meantime, don’t let archaic aesthetics get the best of your own defenses…unless you’re into that kind of thing.

Originally posted at http://blog.publictransitallstars.com February 14, 2010