<p>That sounds like a plausible reason why the reporter got it wrong.</p>
<p>FWIW, here is the link to the article I read that stated he created the facebook account on Sept. 22, which gave me the impression that his “coming out” only occurred on the day he took his life.</p>
<p>I don’t get the same sense you do. I see disgust at the actions of the roommate and friend not because they are “aberrant” but because they are contemptible.</p>
<p>If this behavior is “quite common,” then I feel we have failed our young people. It’s sad that somewhere along the line, respect for the privacy of others, compassion, and tolerance have not been taught to our kids. If they have learned and truly integrated these concepts, it would not matter what new technology comes their way. They would believe that just because they can doesn’t mean that they should-and they would act accordingly.</p>
<p>While it is reprehensible, I’m not sure that it fits hate crime – it feels to me like a bad prank that went horribly wrong. I mean, I could see someone doing this to a straight roommate too, to prank them. Not excusing it, of course.</p>
<p>There was a horrible incident here about 8 years ago. Two boys – a high school senior and a junior – thought it would be funny to record the junior’s 15-year-old ex-girlfriend humiliating herself. They invited her over to the older boy’s house, and she met with her ex-boyfriend alone in a bedroom there. He knew, but she didn’t, that they were being filmed. She apparently begged him to take her back, and offered to fellate him on the spot (and, at least based on student folklore, did just that).</p>
<p>The boys arranged two or three viewing parties, at which they showed the video recording to dozens of juniors and seniors at the boys’ school and the girl’s school (which was separate and close by).</p>
<p>When this came to light, the administrators of the boys’ school immediately started expulsion proceedings. Absolutely properly, in my view. When the dust cleared, the administrators had been fired or quit, and the boys had essentially won their lawsuit against the school.</p>
<p>I think the following editorial is of interest. It discusses BOTH the Rutgers incident and the situation going on right now at U of Michigan (another CC thread is on that incident) as they both relate:</p>
<p>I don’t know that it qualifies as a hate crime either, and I don’t believe that the accused could possibly be held legally responsible for Clementi’s death as some have suggested. However, to call it a “prank” only serves to trivialize this, imo. It was a despicable act. Short sheeting the bed or putting saran wrap on a toilet is a prank. Purposely filming, watching, recording or otherwise making available to others another person’s most intimate moments without their knowledge or permission goes way beyond the concept of “prank,” imo.</p>
<p>I don’t recall ever seeing anyone storm out of a theater in disgust over the peeping scene with John Belushi in Animal House, or the shower scene with Hot Lips in M<em>A</em>S*H, or the very analogous exchange-student scene in American Pie. People laugh at those, still. Like it or not, those things are regularly presented as naughty pranks in our culture, not heinous crimes. They SHOULD be regarded seriously, but they aren’t always.</p>
<p>What makes it seem more serious in this case is an external narrative that the rest of us are superimposing on it – that it was intended to humiliate and out a sensitive gay boy, and that the boy committed suicide because he felt so violated and trapped. That may even be what happened, but based on the actual facts reported so far, we’re making it up. It’s a satisfying moral narrative, and it makes all the right points, but it may not describe what happened to Tyler Clementi.</p>
<p>imagine if the (fictional) major hot lips shower had been broadcast and was seen by dozens or hundreds not present, including potentially folks in US armed forces all over Korea, the staff at I Corps, General McArthur, all the folks back home in the USA.</p>
<p>Would Hawkeye seem quite so innocent? </p>
<p>The technology has implications. Even if people do not always think through those implications.</p>
<p>Brooklynborndad, part of the external narrative that many of us are superimposing on this is that anyone other than the kid’s roommate, and maybe (but not definitely) one friend of the kid’s roommate, saw any video, and that the video that one (or two, or more) people saw involved more than a kiss between two men with their clothes on. We DO know that Ravi tried to set it up so that other friends of his could see more “content” from a subsequent assignation, but I think we also know that that attempt was a failure. General MacArthur and all the folks back home in the USA didn’t see anything.</p>
<p>(Personally, that scene in M<em>A</em>S*H bothers me a lot – deliberate public sexual humiliation to silence and end the career of someone who was essentially no more than a rival in workplace politics. It was like tactical rape. I thought it was funny when I was 15, but not since. But it is part of a long, long tradition of regarding exposure of a rival’s nudity as a fair prank, at least when done by peers.)</p>
<p>^ agree with BBD. Technology requires more vigilance; it does not excuse unsolicited invasions of privacy, nor loosen moral parameters. It’s not reasonable to assume that you will be photographed in your private quarters, let alone that such photography will be shared with the planet.</p>
<p>If you read the gawker story, one thing that is not being noted in most other stories is that some sort of pictures had apparently already been shared with the planet to some degree by the deceased…although perhaps anonymously. Not saying that that gives a license for broadcasting, but a defense attorney might find it to be of interest ini the current circumstance.</p>
<p>dadx…but isn’t there a difference if someone chooses to post pictures of themselves to the world than someone else invading your privacy during a sexual encounter and taking those pics or videos and broadcasting them without your consent or knowledge? Not to mention that posting pictures of yourself anonymously is not the same as being identified.</p>
<p>Exactly, JHS. There was nothing innocently prankish about that scene, though the prevailing “boys will be boys” mentality of most times in the past dubbed it so. I was upset by it at 15, and still would be. (One area where the TV MASH upstaged the movie MASH was unquestionably the treatment of women.)</p>
<p>So, yeah, that too was not a “prank” no matter what some people called it. Can’t speak, I’ll admit, to the American Pie movie as I have not seen it. But the fact that the culture often excuses cruelty and humiliation as innocent prank does not excuse each of us from developing a viable conscience.</p>
<p>“Brooklynborndad, part of the external narrative that many of us are superimposing on this is that anyone other than the kid’s roommate, and maybe (but not definitely) one friend of the kid’s roommate, saw any video”</p>
<p>I do not know how many people saw the video. I suspect that Clementi THOUGHT that lots and lots of people had seen or would see, or might see the video. People under stress, especially if they have even a modestly depressive habit of thought, tend to fear the worst. There are many levels of here “he didnt know”</p>
<p>The pranksters, IIUC, did not know how many folks would or would not see the tweet and look at the video. Clementi did not know how many in fact did. The pranksters, I am sure, did not think through what Clementi might have feared about how many would.</p>
<p>No one who saw the tweet (or who didn’t see it) saw any video. Clementi knew that no one saw it, because he, personally, turned off the webcam. There was no video recorded for anyone to see.</p>
<p>woody, it looks like the intent of one of the accused students was to make live feed available to others to watch. It’s not clear to me that the other accused student did anything other than let a friend hang out in her room and use her computer when his own room was not available.</p>
<p>Really, this is a horrible tragedy, and I feel terrible for the boy who killed himself and especially for his parents. If that point of view were not being expressed by every columnist in the land today, I would be expressing it more myself. But I am also bothered by the witchhunt here, especially as applied to the young woman accused. As far as any of the reports I have read are concerned, it is not clear that she even looked at the first feed, or that she had anything to do with her friend’s set-up of the second feed. Yet she is being pilloried coast-to-coast as a homophobic bully who should spend the rest of her life in jail for broadcasting videos of a closeted boy having gay sex to all and sundry, and thus causing his suicide.</p>