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What do online voyeurism, teen suicide, and the government’s response to WikiLeaks reveal about the shifting fate of privacy in the digital age? 1. The End of Privacy: A Case Study (Tyler Clementi and WikiLeaks) Hillary Clinton decries the release of classified information in Kazakhstan, referencing teen suicide as one consequence of private information being made public. Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei are arrested in the wake of Tyler Clementi’s suicide; they are accused of cyber-spying on Clementi when he brought another man into his...
read moreThe End of Privacy: A Case Study (Tyler Clementi and WikiLeaks)
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 platter. (Rush has publicly called for his assassination.) And then there’s the embarrassment...
read moreThe Panda Sneezes: Youth Culture and The Digital Tattoo
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 quite a scoop for the online magazine which self-defines as a “live review of city news and...
read moreOf Tweets, Timelines, and Chatroulette: The Public Profile of a Life Lived Online
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 of hours in one direction or the other. And, as we will see shortly, because a user can change a...
read moreDon’t Read Wikileaks: The Government Confronts the End of Privacy
“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 this kind as just the next iteration of the generation gap–kids today, with their new fangled...
read more148 Followers and Nothing On: Digital Voyeurism and the Public Sphere
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 friend”). Apparently, she’s a student at a college I attended more than thirty years ago. The...
read moreEveryone Caught in the Act: The World Peeks through the Digital Keyhole
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 Clementi’s status update, perhaps intending to lift Clementi’s spirits, posts an image of...
read moreIs Nothing Sacred? Is Nothing Private?
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 the sort who re-uses a single password, Gawker encourages you to change your password everywhere you...
read moreAfter Abu Ghraib: Standing By in Silence
At this point in the discussion, it should come as no surprise to learn that an account has surfaced on the free online dating service, OKcupid, that appears to have belonged to Julian Assange back in 2006-2007. There’s nothing particularly startling in the profile of the person who self-identifies as Harry Harrison–it’s a dating site after all, so the convention is braggadocio. The profile pictures are definitely Assange: Thinking about “changing the world through passion, inspiration and trickery.” Assange, at...
read moreIn The Spirit of the Season, Time Magazine Rips You a New One: Of Prizes and WMDs
Prizes. At this time of year, you can’t escape them. Top ten viral videos. Best scandals of the year. The Darwin Awards. And, of course, the induction into print media’s Hall of Fame: Time‘s Man of the Year Award. This award, you’ll recall, recognizes the person who “for better or worse has most influenced events in the past year.” Like the Academy Awards, there’s a lot of build up, the pre-hype hype, the hype, the post-hype hype sweeping up. And then, within a month, like all those New Year’s...
read moreDon’t Poke the Bear: Scrimmaging with Anonymous
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, actually? Picture a restaurant swamped at lunch; the kitchen can’t get the food out quickly...
read moreThought Experiment: What Sitcom Best Articulates the Dreams of the Digital World’s Most Active Citizens?
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 road before the forest becomes pitch black and I’m utterly lost. Why? Think back in time, way...
read moreThought Experiment Continued: Cyber-Spying Made Easy
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 momentarily.) MacBooks, as the Apple line of laptops are called, now come with the webcam built directly...
read moreVirtual Communities and Embodied Realities: “he was SPYING ON ME….do they see nothing wrong with this?”
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 justusboys.com. In these posts, cit2mo seeks advice upon discovering that his roommate 1.) had used a...
read moreVirtual Communities and Embodied Realities: Public Displays, Before and After the End of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell
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 create a felt-sense of embodied community in the wake of Clementi’s suicide. 1. Taking to the...
read moreLet’s Go to Court: One-Point-Oh Responses to a 2.0 Reality
On December 21st, 2010, the Home News reported that Tyler Clementi’s parents filed notice of their intent to sue Rutgers University. In the notice, the Clementi family’s lawyer contends that the university failed to protect Clementi from the “unlawful or otherwise improper acts perpetrated against” him. The notice goes on to say: it appears Rutgers University failed to act, failed to put in place and/or failed to implement, and enforce policies and practices that would have prevented or deterred such acts, and that Rutgers...
read moreOne-Point-Oh Media Reports on 2.0 Realities: On Recording, Streaming, and Live Streaming
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 instance: Cyber-spying Made Easy: Video Chatting Via the Cloud What did Clementi need to do to put an end to...
read moreThis 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 those who were “under aged.” At the back of the local used paperback bookstore, a curtain separated general reading from “adult” reading material. At the 7-11, magazines for the general...
read moreThe PG-13 Version of This Blog Entry Has Been Rated NSFW
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 those who were “under aged.” At the back of the local used paperback bookstore, a curtain...
read moreNow Things Get Complicated: The Calculus of Desire
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 five additional posts to the “college roommate thread” since cit2mo’s last post at on...
read moreThose Loose Ends: On Magic Keys and Fig Leaves
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 still hadn’t adjusted correctly (The soruce of the confusion is explained here.) Now, finally,...
read moreThe End
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 his MySpace account; he puts together YouTube videos that record his incoherent musings. And, like...
read moreConverting GMT+1 to EST
O.K. Why did this cause me such trouble, you ask? How hard could it be to convert Greenwich Mean Time +1 to Eastern Standard Time (which is GMT -4, unless it is during Daylight Savings Time, when it is GMT -5). If you’re focused on the wrong thing, then you add +1 and -4 and get -3. Which is what I did originally. So, I took all the justusboys time stamps and subtracted three hours, which provided times for the events somewhere out in the Atlantic Ocean. But the question is what is the absolute distance between GMT+1 and GMT-4. The...
read moreThrough the Keyhole: Observations on the Ravi Trial
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 infuriating. The rush to transform the events into a damning narrative was immediate. Homophobic Indian...
read more“Viewing Parties”: Indifference Takes the Stand
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 trial for invasion of privacy, tampering with evidence, and bias intimidation, all charges stemming...
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