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yeah, this story sucked some of the air from the world i think.
i also didn't take it as being primarily about privacy---more about thoughtlessness or stupidity, that special kind of 18-year-old stupidity that can make otherwise innocuous things like a webcam and live feed into a weapons that result in the ending of a life and wrecking of other lives...and i would be amazed if either of these boneheads thought out what they were doing at all. not until later, when the shit hit the fan.
if i were the president of rutgers, i would like to think i'd have the spine to say more than he managed. civility is nice. no shit.
it's hard to say, though---these two boneheads had access to technology that made this feed very easy to do. at no point in it did any ethics, any consideration of ethics, of harm to others, enter the picture. and i don't think that "talking about values" would have changed anything, really--and i say that because none of us knows anything at all about the backgrounds of either ravi (the main actor) or wei. none of us knows anything about them at all. it's entirely possible that they grew up immersed in endless talking about values and such. or it's possible they didn't.
what we do know is that at the critical moments, when they decided to flip on the camera and stream it, none of those words got connected to their actions.
o and we know that tyler clementi jumped off the george washington bridge.
it'll be interesting to see whether this story is followed in the press as it moves toward the legal theater and what infotainment surfaces about these folks.
and i dont know what else tyler clementi could have done to protect his privacy. i suppose one could say that he tacitly expected it would not be violated by others. and in that he was wrong.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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