Bewildered Society

Captured 1:20 p.m. EST 5/10/10 from CNN.com.

Andrey Ternovskiy strikes you as the definition of a “loser,” circa-2002,  from accounts  in the upcoming edition of The New Yorker. He stopped trying at school, lacks visible friendships and spends a lot of time in front of his dual computer screens at home.

Not that you’d expect him to recognize that – he was merely 10 years old in 2002. Despite his youth, he’s the wiz responsible for opening realms of access to stripteasing loners, unsightly masturbation, and intriguing relationships lasting mere seconds.

Ternovskiy is the creator of Chatroulette.com.

While providing some fairly thought-provoking analysis of the Chatroulette phenom, it’s more riveting to read observations of the  Russian teen who brought the concept to browsers.

The article highlights social characteristics of the “18-year-old high-school dropout” (born 1992, if you’re bad at crunching digits) and a generation of nerds currently and soon attempting to rule the world. Starting first with the visuals:

He is thin and nervous, with light sprays of acne on his cheeks and a fuzz of dark-blond hair. He has a hard time making eye contact and learned English by spending thousands of hours chatting online, but he says that his passion is talking with people and “exploring other cultures.”

Later detailing Ternovskiy’s face-to-face social ineptitude:

The best way to talk to Ternovskiy is through some kind of digital intermediary. Shy and evasive in person, he fills with a wry swagger when he is just a stream of text. “They have no business no money blablablabla,” he typed to me one afternoon, feigning phlegmatic unconcern with the financial woes of an advertiser he’d been negotiating with—his only one. Like much of his generation, Ternovskiy has an online persona far more developed than his real one.

Transitioning from his thoughts on school and friendship(s).

Ternovskiy, meanwhile, sees school—and college—as a waste of time. “The last three years at school, I haven’t done anything,” he says. “I just can’t make myself. There’s so much interesting stuff in the world, and I have to sit there with textbooks?”

By “the world,” of course, Ternovskiy means the Internet, which is also where most of his friends are. His closest confidant is a Russian immigrant named Kirill Gura, who lives in Charleston, West Virginia. Every night for the past five years, Ternovskiy has turned on his computer, found Kirill on MSN Messenger, and talked to him until one of them fell asleep. “He’s a real friend,” Ternovskiy says.

Ternovskiy captures a tourist visa for the U.S., visiting New York City, San Fransisco and ultimately capturing an apartment in Palo Alto. The article concludes with a familiar situation for anyone experienced with online-centric relationships.

He also traveled to West Virginia to meet Kirill Gura, the friend he had chatted with on MSN Messenger every night for years, but whom he’d never actually met. The transition was bumpy. “It was a little weird, you know,” Ternovskiy told me later. “We was just looking at each other without having much to say.”

Sucks when you can’t click “next,” doesn’t it?

[Link via Shortformblog]