Source title: “Student secretly taped having sex kills self”
http://www.msnbc.com/id/39419543 (accessed 30 Sept 2010)
The news article, “Student secretly taped having sex kills self”, is about an incident that happened in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in the US, on 22 September 2010 (so it is very recent). There was this Rutgers University freshman who committed suicide by jumping off the George Washington Bridge after two schoolmates posted on Twitter a video of him having sex with another boy. According to police investigation, the victim’s roommate hid a camera in their dorm room and then transmitted the live image on the Internet on 19 Sept 2010. Days later, 22 Sept, the victim left a farewell note on his Facebook account before ending his life.
This reminded me of one of the unit’s workshop. I believe it was on week 8 (Virtual Ethics). I think the article is relevant to the unit because it makes us question the lack (?) of ethics and civility in cyberspace. It is not a scholarly article, but as a news article it is from a reliable source. The msnbc website is updated regularly. This particular article was posted 30 Sept and is a compilation of information from other sources such as The New York Times, The Associated Press, ABC News, and the Star-Ledger of Newark.
The news article triggered a lot of comments/arguments in the msnbc website. To date, there are 2250 comments posted. It is an interesting read because we discussed most of these topics in our tutorials. There are comments about cyber bullying, invasion of privacy, gay rights, hate crimes, responsible use of technology, etc.
The Internet has long been considered as an “agent of democratization,” where anyone can pretty much say what they want without fear of censorship or punishment. But the New Brunswick incident (and others like it) is a clear example of how lethal “pure democracy” can be.
This made me think: Should social networking sites be more regulated to protect the privacy of its users (even non-users in some cases)? Should these sites be regulated so that abuse can be prevented? There had been numerous cases of invasions of privacy in the Internet; however, Internet companies are still implementing a hands-off policy on such matters. They always use the free speech card when defending their stand of not doing anything to stop these Internet “crimes”.
In the news article, the sites Twitter and iChat (intended to anyway) were used by the victim’s two schoolmates to broadcast their illegal recording. This is a form of cyber bullying, I suppose. Shouldn’t sites like Twitter and iChat have filters to prevent abuse such as this? I think they should, at least to a degree. Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for free speech and all but it all boils down to using technology responsibly. The Internet should not become a safe haven for those with criminal intent.
The two students who recorded the victim’s trysts may not have considered their actions as illegal. This is probably because there are a lot of cases such as this in the Internet. Too numerous that it’s considered normal. And honestly, if the victim hadn’t committed suicide and the fact that he was gay, there wouldn’t be passionate debates about it at all.
There was an article given during the week 8 workshop. I believe it was from the Weekend Australian Magazine. It was about the proposed Internet filtering. The head of policy for Google Australia, Iarla Flynn, commented that “the Internet reflects the real world”. To an extent this is true. And since it is, perhaps we should be really worried. Okay, there is bullying in real life so now there’s cyber bullying. There is rape in real life, now there’s also rape in cyberspace. I wonder what’s next.
With the current inaction in addressing Internet crimes like the one in the msnbc news article, are we a society that has become more tolerant of deviant behaviour? Or are we a society that refuses to acknowledge that there is a problem that needs to be fixed? The problem with the Internet is that it is too broad, and the task of filtering/censorship can present a lot of grey areas.
On a different note (this might be in poor taste, sorry), have we really become dependent on social networking sites or the Internet in general that we even leave suicide notes through them?
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