The New York Times reports today:
It started with a Twitter message on Sept. 19: “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.”
That night, the authorities say, the Rutgers University student who sent the message used a camera in his dormitory room to stream the roommate’s intimate encounter live on the Internet.
And three days later, the roommate who had been surreptitiously broadcast — Tyler Clementi, an 18-year-old freshman and an accomplished violinist — jumped from the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River in an apparent suicide.
The Sept. 22 death, details of which the authorities disclosed on Wednesday, was the latest by a young American that followed the online posting of hurtful material. The news came on the same day that Rutgers kicked off a two-year, campuswide project to teach the importance of civility, with special attention to the use and abuse of new technology.
Read the whole article and other stories about Tyler Clementi online, then feel free to provide your thoughts about the issues this news brings up in the comments.
These stories happen time and time again and still there is no justice being done.. In class we discussed the problems with homophobia--it is tied to a person's need to be accepted in society and due to their low self-esteem they must bully others to feel better about themselves. Although this happens on many different occasions, it is a disturbing and ongoing occurrence that it applies to homosexuals in large part because they seem "different". People need to learn how to build self-esteem in making themselves better, whether it is by playing a sport, drawing, running, excelling in academics--whatever it is! The thing is that the bullying needs to stop, because these are the dire consequences we face and although it is terrible that this boy committed suicide, the boy who streamed the video live, his roommate, has to live with the thought that he killed another boy out of sheer ignorance and immaturity.
ReplyDeleteI think that a lot of people see this as sad because people assume that people shouldn't commit suicide. "Oh, he was bullied and killed himself. Sad." I think, though, that there's something so much more intense behind this. I was online, and I saw an image of a noose and a heading that said something along the lines of "Gay deaths aren't suicides, they're murders." You can see the image here: http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l9ivlz8NdY1qa552fo1_500.jpg. The image made me really think about what I thought about the phrase, and I think that I've come to the conclusion that I agree with the vast majority of the things on that image. When I saw this, I was reminded very quickly of the image, and have come to a startling realization that because of this exploitation a student died. It was second-hand murder in my opinion, and I wonder what it'll take to make it stop.
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