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...

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,...

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...

What better way to sum up the last couple of weeks’ meditations on the transformative powers of Web 2.0 than WikiLeaks? When Paul and I make our presentations on the future of higher education, we begin by stipulating that the dominance of digital media is not inevitable at some future time, but rather is already a fait accompli. Here’s one way to illustrate this fact: a few months back, the New York Times ran an article with a...

In Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong makes the startling–and since much debated–claim that writing “heightens consciousness,” because it alienates the writer from the present moment. He goes on to explain: Alienation from a natural milieu can be and indeed is in many ways essential for full human life. To live and understand fully, we need not only proximity, but also distance. This writing provides for consciousness as...