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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Here’s the chronology we have so far based on Dharun Ravi’s twitter account: A caveat about a chronology built using time stamps: despite the apparent specificity of the down-to-the-minute-times, a chronology of this kind should be seen as providing a sense of the relative relationship between a sequence of events. If, for example, Ravi chose a time zone other than Eastern Standard Time, all his time stamps would be off by X number...

A little more than a year ago,  On September 29th, 2010 Gawker ran a story with the headline: How a College Kid Livestreamed His Roommate’s Gay Sexual Encounter, Possibly Causing a Suicide.  Dharun Ravi’s trial begins this week and is sure to receive international coverage. The series of essays explores what the original coverage of this tragedy has to tell us about the changing definition of privacy in the 21st century. This was...