Hey
I’m looking at the case of American university student Tyler Clementi’s suicide, which occurred about two weeks ago on 22nd September 2010. Clementi, believing that he was safe in the privacy of his dorm at uni, had engaged in a homosexual act one night when he’d asked his roommate to keep the dorm free. Unbeknownst to him though, the roommate, Dharun Ravi, had set up a webcam in the dorm. The encounter was filmed and then streamed online by Ravi and another student. When Clementi found, the public humiliation led him to take his own life by jumping off the George Washington bridge; his last Facebook status read “Jumping off the gw bridge sorry”.
I think this article looks at a lot of the issues surrounding cyber-bullying and privacy on the Internet, not to mention identity – many believe it was the fact that Clementi was gay that caused him to be the subject of such bullying. The two students who streamed the video are now being charged with invasion of privacy for what they probably believed to be a “prank”. Social media and the Internet give people a greater amount of confidence to pull such “pranks” due to the fact that their identity is somewhat concealed; I believe that in this case the two students did not quite understand the impact their actions would have on Clementi’s life.
Also the clear importance of Facebook to Clementi - posting his suicide as a status on Facebook indicates how big a part of his life social media actually was.
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