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...

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...

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...

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...

There’s only one certainty here. This will happen again. We all hope not at our schools. And when the news breaks, we will hope that no one we know was involved, that the shooter wasn’t moving among our friends and colleagues, wasn’t studying anything in our area, wasn’t anything like anyone we’ve ever known or been. It is sure to be a loner or set of loners, ostracized, picked on, at a moment of great stress—the end of the semester...

Paul and I are frequently asked what we mean when we say we’re working with the yet-to-be-invented genre of “the idea-driven visual essay.” To answer this, first we must consider the phenomenal growth of YouTube: Created by three guys in 2005 as a means for sharing user-generated videos, YouTube tapped directly into the desire to “broadcast yourself,” the company’s trademarked slogan. The first video posted to...