Tyler Clementi’s body was pulled from the Hudson River on September 29th, 2010, a week after he had changed his Facebook status to read “jumping off gw bridge sorry.” That same day, Gawker (“Today’s Gossip is Tomorrow’s News) posted a screen shot of Dharun Ravi’s Twitter account, with Ravi’s tweets about spying on Clementi highlighted:   I dare you to video chat me from 9:30 to 12 Ravi is now on...

I hadn’t planned on returning to the case of Tyler Clementi’s suicide. I wrote extensively about it last year, starting in late September when the news broke that Clementi, a first-year student at Rutgers, had jumped from the George Washington Bridge after discovering that his roommate, Dharun Ravi, had streamed live footage of him with another man for others to see. The news coverage in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy was...

O.K. Why did this cause me such trouble, you ask? How hard could it be to convert Greenwich Mean Time +1 to Eastern Standard Time (which is GMT -4, unless it is during Daylight Savings Time, when it is GMT -5). If you’re focused on the wrong thing, then you add +1 and -4 and get -3. Which is what I did originally. So, I took all the justusboys time stamps and subtracted three hours, which provided times for the events somewhere out in the...

As our meditation on Tyler Clementi’s last days comes to a close, a very different ending has assumed center stage. Jared Loughner, exhibiting bizarre behavior in class, is finally advised to withdraw from Pima Community College this past November and is told not to seek re-entry without a mental evaluation. Paranoid, Loughner finds a virtual community that both shares and stokes his sense of outrage at a world gone mad. He posts rants to...

A 2.0 moment: a reader writes me directly last night to say that the justusboys time stamps are at GMT +1. “I was wondering if you took this into consideration?” Although I wrote about the problems with time stamps early on in this meditation, I didn’t think to check this. So, tip o’ the hat to Mike for this. Then, I thought I’d got it right, revised, and reposted. But Steve and Patrick wrote me to point out that I...

So, here’s where we are on the timeline: it’s 6:44pm (1:44PM, EST)*, the day before Tyler Clementi commits suicide and Clementi has just posted to the “college roommate spying” thread on Just Us Boys that he will speak to the dorm RA that night. cit2mo’s next post is Wednesday, September 22nd, 4:38AM (Tuesday, September 21st, 11:38PM). It’s fair to say that it is full of surprises. Although there have been...

The following entry is the “SFW” (i.e., PG-13) version of: This Blog Entry Has Been Rated NSFW What is “age appropriate” viewing? Who determines when you can see what? Let’s begin with some representative vignettes. The first from the print-centric paradigm of my youth. When I was a teenager in the seventies, growing up in the South, there were visible, physical boundaries marking what was fit for consumption by...

What is “age appropriate” viewing? Who determines when you can see what? Let’s begin with some representative vignettes. The first from the print-centric paradigm of my youth. When I was a teenager in the seventies, growing up in the South, there were visible, physical boundaries marking what was fit for consumption by those who were “under aged.” At the back of the local used paperback bookstore, a curtain...

If we fold together the timelines that I have been piecing together over the most recent posts, something confounding emerges: cit2mo knows that he has been spied on by his roommate. He has filled out a form requesting a roommate change. And then he contacts Ravi asking to have the room again that night? This is virtually inexplicable. Unless, of course, you understood, as Clementi certainly did, how the spying took place in the first...

On December 21st, 2010, the Home News reported that Tyler Clementi’s parents filed notice of their intent to sue Rutgers University. In the notice, the Clementi family’s lawyer contends that the university failed to protect Clementi from the “unlawful or otherwise improper acts perpetrated against” him. The notice goes on to say: it appears Rutgers University failed to act, failed to put in place and/or failed to implement, and...