A Look Back: The Suicide of Tyler Clementi & Privacy in the Internet Age

Another argument America had back in late September was over the tragic case of Tyler Clementi:

http://abcnews.go.com/US/victim-secret-dorm-sex-tape-commits-suicide/story?id=11758716

A Rutgers University freshman posted a goodbye message on his Facebook page before jumping to his death after his roommate secretly filmed him during a "sexual encounter" in his dorm room and posted it live on the Internet.

Items belonging to 18-year-old Rutgers student Tyler Clementi were found by the George Washington Bridge last week, according to authorities. Clementi's freshman ID card and driver's license were in the wallet.
Clementi's post on his Facebook page, dated Sept. 22 at 8:42 p.m. read, "Jumping off the gw bridge sorry."
Clementi's body has not been recovered, but police have pulled an unidentified male body from the Hudson River just north of the bridge.

...

Two students, Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei, have been charged with two counts each of invasion of privacy after allegedly placing a camera in Clementi's room and livestreaming the recording online on Sept. 19, according to a written statement by New Jersey's Middlesex County Prosecutor Bruce Kaplan.

A Twitter page that appears to have been operated by Ravi but has since been taken offline shows messages in which the accused student takes credit for the alleged videotaping of Clementi.
On Sept. 19, Ravi appears to tweet, "Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into molly's room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay."
Ravi faces two additional counts of invasion of privacy for allegedly attempting to use the camera to view and transmit another sexual encounter involving the same student just two days later, said Kaplan.

This story could be presented in several different frameworks.  It could be viewed as a commentary about the acceptance of homosexuals among some sections of American society.  It could be viewed as another fight over hate-crimes legislation.  There's a lot going on here, for sure.

But I choose to view the main point to this story as how privacy has changed in the internet age.  This is the most important theme in this story as it relates to this class.  I saw this story today:

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/39552862/ns/today-today_people

Karen Owen took kiss-and-tell to a whole new level when she combined her Duke University-honed academic acumen with her extracurricular wild side to create an elaborate sex list ranking the college men she bedded.

But now the recent Duke grad finds herself red-faced over attention she never bargained for: Her tongue-in-cheek “unofficial senior thesis” on sex with Duke athletes spread from the three friends she originally e-mailed to the whole 14,000-strong student body and, eventually, to websites the whole world can see.
“It’s funny because we know the people on it,” one Duke University student told NBC for a TODAY report on Owen’s now-infamous sex list.

...

Owen’s sex ranking is nothing if not precise. She took a list of 13 men she slept with, drawing mainly from Duke’s lacrosse team — the same team that was embroiled in a sex scandal of its own in 2006 — and created a bar graph ranking their sexual prowess. She left little to the imagination in creating a 42-slide PowerPoint presentation, detailing sex in the university library during finals week, sex in cars and, most of all, sex while inebriated.
“In my blackout state, still managed to crawl into bed with a Duke athlete,” Owen commented on one escapade.

In my opinion, these two stories are connected.  Now, I obviously understand that none of the Duke athletes mentioned in Owen's "report" are likely to go and commit suicide.  There are some stark and understandable cultural differences.

But nevertheless, there's a common theme: gone are the days when a small group of newspaper owners and publishers have the power to bury stories like these.  In the internet age, anyone has the power and the platform to completely ruin someone's privacy.  As much as we like to blame the media for having it out for a person, and as often as that point is true, the bottom line is that ordinary people are often to blame for the irrelevant details of the private lives of private citizens becoming public knowledge.

As the famous quote goes: "We have met the enemy, and he is us."