I hadn’t planned on returning to the case of Tyler Clementi’s suicide. I wrote extensively about it last year, starting in late September when the news broke that Clementi, a first-year student at Rutgers, had jumped from the George Washington Bridge after discovering that his roommate, Dharun Ravi, had streamed live footage of him with another man for others to see. The news coverage in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy was...
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...
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...
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...
“This is not a ‘phone,’” Dr. Englander told the parents who looked, collectively, shellshocked. What you’ve given your child “is a mobile computer.” This quote comes from “As Bullies Go Digital, Parents Play Catchup,” the latest cage-rattling piece in the Times’ ongoing coverage of technology’s disruptive influence on the family. It’s easy enough to interpret parental cluelessness of...
So, it’s late November, 2010. There’s Hillary Clinton, newly landed in Kazakhstan, trying to handle the fallout from WikiLeaks’ release of that boatload of private diplomatic cables. It’s a messy business, to be sure. On the one hand, we’re an open society and she’s there trying to get Kazakhstan to follow our lead. On the other hand, all across America there are cries to have Julian Assange’s head on a...
