Foucault, Exhibitionism and Voyeurism on Chatroulette

Sexuality, understood as a Foucauldian discourse that expresses itself through our passions and pursuits and contributes massively to our sociallyconstructed identity formation, has from the outset been a major factor in the
growth of the internet. As the ultimate look-but-don‘t-touch medium, the
computer screen has offered us a pornographic emporium in the privacy of our
homes, fed first by the producers of material in the standard broadcast mode, then
more and more by ourselves, to each other, in the social media context of online
sexual social networking. The recent shift of sexual video material from broadcast
to social media mode highlights the fundamental exhibitionism/voyeurism dyad at
the core of all this activity, and finds its most impersonal, anonymous apotheosis
in the phenomenon that is ChatRoulette, where visual discourse-objects are
deployed in a nexus of online sexual power relations.