THE NEW YORKER "The Story of a Suicide: Two college roommates, a webcam and a tragedy"
This is one of the best articles I’ve read recently. Not only because it was extremely well written, but also because it’s made me think a lot about the world we live in today.
By now we all have heard of Tyler Clementi, the young Rutgers student who took his life after a series of events his freshman year; the core of which involving his roommate having spied on him via webcam during a homosexual encounter.
To simplify it into a soundbite doesn’t remotely do justice to what actually took place, the way the New Yorker unfolds it conversation by conversation, a carefully timed sequence of miscommunications. What amazed me in this article was that they could do just that. To the minute, to the day, to the letter.
That kind of reconstruction is only possible because we allow it to be. We text rather than talk. We email, we post, we ichat, we tweet. All of this leaves a trail, which we tend to think of as invisible or worse yet, not think of at all. And that is exactly what allowed not only the New Yorker to piece this story together, and Ravi (Tyler’s roommate) to form a full picture of who he thought Tyler was before ever engaging with him at all —- before they had ever spoken a word, corresponded or met in person, and even more unsettling, even after they had —- all through a simple google search.
Certainly, what happened was a nightmarish chain of events. And it’s easy to vilify the roommate, whose judgment was clearly so poor and sensitivity so clearly lacking. But reading through, I also couldn’t help but think of a lot of other 18 year olds out there, who don’t at all realize the power of their words, nor the permanence of the internet.
I wonder sometimes what it’s going to look like to elect the next generation of politicians, in an age where their every folly has been documented on Facebook. I wonder what it does to children to grow up in a world where they can access people and information like never before, but that same system can turn on them to very publicly, very permanently, and often anonymously humiliate them. It’s not a simple as “bullying.” I think it’s something else, more mental and durable than the shove in the hallway that word conjures.
I think of my little cousins who are in high school, whom I have watched grow up for the past 16 years, and how whole conversations are hosted on their Facebook page. How this thing is so woven into the fabric of their social interactions, I’m not sure that I understand at all what it’s like to be in high school anymore. I wonder if they realize that that all of it will still be there, in the archives if you search hard enough, for future college admissions teams, for future employers, for future boyfriends. How privacy settings can’t save us from what has been written on the internet. How children can be mean. How they are getting tougher. Are we all getting tougher?
For all the good it’s done and doors it’s opened (and believe me, it’s done so for me), there is a dark underbelly to this thing: the internet, facebook, twitter, all of it. But we are all in the boat now, up the river, and we have a choice to make. Allow yourself to form opinions of others solely based on what you read, or form them based on who you know. Judge a book by it’s cover, or by the content of it’s character. And realizing that no matter what you do, you will still be judged by your cover, by what people can read about you, the responsibility falls to us to be less flippant about the image we project. If the words don’t match the person, it is because we have lied. Be true.
I often worry about this same thing. For myself and now for the boys.
