My last post presented a case study of how print news reports on plagiarism in the university. In this post, I want to reverse the poles: a student paper publishes a letter to the editor; the letter is picked up by an online scandal aggregator and turned into a news story. And the story jumps from site to site, makes its way to MSNBC and from there jumps the Atlantic and appears in the Daily Mail. What can we learn about 21st century writing...

It’s early December, end of the fall 2011 semester. What’s above the fold in the paper version of the Sunday edition of New Jersey’s biggest paper, The Star Ledger? Herman Cain suspending his presidential campaign? In-depth coverage of the case against now disgraced former governor Jon Corzine and now former CEO of MF Global? A Rutgers student’s effort to clear her name of plagiarism? Plagiarism, of course.   The...

Act One, Scene one: April 27th, late in the afternoon. Returning from a matinee performance of Tony Kushner’s “The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Communism and Socialism, with a Guide to the Scriptures,” (the title is a snide reference to an unfinished dissertation, twenty years in production, by the main character’s son). There’s a line stuck in my head that’s been looping the whole train ride home....

Without much effort, you can find images of how quickly life has changed for the people of Japan. New York Times Front Page, March 16, 2011 What is it like to experience such a disaster? One minute you’re sitting in your home; the next you’re washed out to sea. Do you want to survive, having seen your neighborhood erased? Do you know where your kids are? Your friends? Your past? * What does it feel like to wait for a tsunami to...

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...

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...

So, where are we now that we’ve reached this eighth post in my ongoing meditation on the end of privacy in the Web 2.0 world? A brief recap is in order: I began by using the tweets of Dharun Ravi to establish a preliminary timeline of the events that immediately preceded Tyler Clementi’s suicide. I then revised and updated that timeline based on what are assumed to be Clementi’s posts, as “cit2mo,” to a forum on...

Prizes. At this time of year, you can’t escape them. Top ten viral videos. Best scandals of the year. The Darwin Awards. And, of course, the induction into print media’s Hall of Fame: Time‘s Man of the Year Award. This award, you’ll recall, recognizes the person who “for better or worse has most influenced events in the past year.” Like the Academy Awards, there’s a lot of build up, the pre-hype hype,...

My Facebook inbox contained a friend request this morning from a young woman who has three profile pix, including this one: Friend Request, Blurring Added I don’t know her and don’t believe I’ve ever seen her. When I received the request, we had no “mutual friends”–meaning none of my 174 friends on Facebook is friends with her (two hours after the request, the young woman and I now have “1 mutual...