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...
OK, I admit it. This is my one real brush with a real celebrity. Sure, I’ve had one or two near brushes with real celebrity. Who hasn’t? For example, I did see Richard Gere once while having dinner in the city with a celebrity job candidate. But that was from afar and the more memorable part of the evening was finding a gray, shattered chicken bone in whatever vegetarian glop I had ordered. So, in the memory ranking, Gere still gets...
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...
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...
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 the end of my last post, I asked the question, “Is nothing sacred?” Here are some responses to that question, via the world of Web 2.0: After a day of denial, Gawker acknowledges that it has been hacked and that the private data of its 1.3M users have been posted to an open site for downloading by others.Meaning?If you have a Gawker account, your password is available to anyone who visits the bit-torrent site. (If you’re...
Screenshot of Tyler Clementi’s Facebook Page I find this image heart wrenching. At the top of New York Post’s cropped screenshot, Clementi’s last known public correspondence: “jumping off the gw bridge sorry” Below this, two comments on Clementi’s wall, time stamped three days after his suicide: a worried friend, telling Clementi to make contact; another friend, perhaps oblivious to the seriousness of...
“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...
