One bad apple don’t spoil the whole bunch, girl! The one bad apple argument is extraordinarily resilient. Here’s President Bush on Abu Ghraib in a speech at the US Army War College in 2004: “A new Iraq will also need a humane, well-supervised prison system. Under the dictator, prisons like Abu Ghraib were symbols of death and torture. That same prison became a symbol of disgraceful conduct by a few American troops who...
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...
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...
In Part 1 on Virtual Communities and Embodies Realities, I moved from Tyler Clementi’s virtual community on justusboys.com to the embodied community of his dorm. In Part 2, I will focus on a number of embodied communities at Rutgers and then, in the remaining posts in this thread, I will continue the discussion of Clementi’s correspondence with his virtual community. Here are a handful of examples of local efforts at Rutgers to...
Here’s a thought experiment. Say you wanted to use your computer to spy on someone else, how would you do it? Would you have to be a technological genius/super geek to pull off such a feat? Back before the year 2000, in the Web 1.0 world, you’d need to have been pretty clever to do this. Not being particularly gifted in the area of gadgetry, if this thought experiment is taking place circa 2000, I can get about two steps down the...
At this point in the discussion, it should come as no surprise to learn that an account has surfaced on the free online dating service, OKcupid, that appears to have belonged to Julian Assange back in 2006-2007. There’s nothing particularly startling in the profile of the person who self-identifies as Harry Harrison–it’s a dating site after all, so the convention is braggadocio. The profile pictures are definitely...
“This is not a ‘phone,’” Dr. Englander told the parents who looked, collectively, shellshocked. What you’ve given your child “is a mobile computer.” This quote comes from “As Bullies Go Digital, Parents Play Catchup,” the latest cage-rattling piece in the Times’ ongoing coverage of technology’s disruptive influence on the family. It’s easy enough to interpret parental cluelessness of...
