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...

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...

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...

So, here’s the challenge. Say you wanted to use your computer to spy on someone else, how would you do it? We saw in the previous post that, if you were trying this circa 2000, the technological challenges would be beyond the reach of your average computer user. ) It turns out that in 2010, the Web 2.0 world makes this a relatively easy task. First, assume possession of an Apple laptop. (Why this assumption is made will be clarified...

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...

Hacktivism is in the news, if not exactly grabbing headlines. When major service providers pulled the plug on WikiLeaks, temporarily cutting off access to the site via its domain name, “WikiLeaks.org” in hopes of hobbling financial support the venture, the boys at anonymous sprung into action, unleashing their anarchic, anti-corporate rage in the form of a series of attacks on a host of websites across the globe. What does this mean,...