In September of 2010, the news came that a promising Rutgers student named Tyler Clementi had committed suicide by jumping off the George Washington bridge. The news at the time tied his death to some actions of his roommate, who had set up a webcam, caught Clementi engaging in homosexual activities with said webcam, then tweeting about what Clementi was doing. Clementi said goodbye via his Facebook page. It seemed like the whole case was something new for the world of social media to worry about – the use of social media networking sites by bullies at all age levels. More and more stories started surfacing about children who were horrifically bullied and abused online to the point where they decided to take their own lives.
This past week, Clementi’s roommate, Dharun Ravi, was found guilty of several different faults, including invasion of privacy and tampering with evidence (he went back and tried to delete some of the tweets he had sent out about Clementi and his webcam). Ravi will be sentenced on May 21st.
Here’s the thing. Even though the story originally was framed as a sort of “the evils of social media” story, I’m not 100% sure that’s really the main story. Now, it’s great that the dangers of social media were introduced, but if you look at the story as it was told during the trial, most of Ravi’s actions could have been carried out before the advent of Twitter. Indeed, many of his actions could have been carried out before webcams.
The lack of privacy in college
Here’s the odd reality about living in a dorm – you are sharing space with another person whom you may not know at all, and the space you are in may only be 20 feet square or so. You have enough room for the beds, the desks, maybe a mini fridge, and that’s about it. You shower with everyone in your hall in a lot of cases. To put it mildly, privacy is something you learn to live without during your college years. As fate would have it, these years are the years when you might need your privacy the most. It is during these years that people begin to identify themselves as individuals separate from their parents and families. They begin to explore their sexuality and all sorts of other things. Life can start to get messy, and just at that point, you’re shuffled into a tiny living area with no dividing door or curtain.
When I was in college, we didn’t have Twitter or Facebook. AOL IM was still pretty magnificent as technology went. Our campus “broadcast” system was also mind-blowingly exciting. You could broadcast a message to everyone in your dorm with one simple click. Wow! But a case like Clementi’s still easily could have happened. The walls of our rooms weren’t exactly soundproof. You saw who came into a room and who came out. It wasn’t rocket science to figure out what had happened. Add to that the intense desire to gossip, juvenile jealousies, and general twenty-something craziness and there was plenty of fertile ground for drama of the most dire kind. In fact, during my freshman year, when I lived in an all girls dorm, one woman in particular was often singled out and made fun of because other women assumed she was gay.
Cutting to the core
Perhaps the main role social media played in the events surrounding Tyler Clementi’s death is that instead of just broadcasting his actions to a group of friends or to a dorm, Ravi, by using Twitter, was essentially broadcasting something veyr personal to everyone in the world who could see his tweets. This amplification of what could easily happen on any campus in the world is certainly a problem, but to my mind the priority remains the bullying itself. The webcam is something that existed beyond the realms of social media. The sense of discomfort Ravi clearly felt that homosexual relations were going on in a room he also lived in is something that we should talk to our kids about. And of course, there is the question as to why Tyler Clementi’s wish to have a new roommate after he discovered Ravi’s actions was not granted. Maybe college dorm counselors need to be trained in new ways when it comes to intervening in complex situations like the one Clementi and Ravi were involved in.
None of these things corresponds directly to social media though. Social Media is merely the amplifier of offline actions.
I am not sorry that Clementi’s death caught so much attention in the online world. I am not sorry that his tragic case made people question whether social media is truly safe for our young people to use. I’m not sorry that the case raised questions like social media privacy – when should a parent stop monitoring their child’s social media world?
But I think there are OTHER issues that may be just as weighty. Is there a better way to house students on college campuses? Is there something amiss in our society that Ravi could put up a webcam and not think he was invading anyone’s privacy because the webcam was up in *his* room?
We are living in complex times, and our young people seem to be in danger of bearing the brunt of it. That is the overriding concern. Social Media is just a small piece of the puzzle.
Do you agree?
Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dborman2/3258371445/ via Creative Commons
I have serious doubts that social media is the straw that broke the camels back in this particular instance.
I think you are dead on when you say that the dorm environment and college in general offer ample opportunities for someone to “elevate” their game from jerk to douchebag.
Some of the funniest and meanest things I have ever seen took place in college. Sometimes they were one and the same. One of the questions I wonder about is what happens to the people who don’t jump. How many damaged souls are there walking around now.
Don’t mean to take away from Clementi’s death or to minimize it either.
@TheJackB I think any sort of environment where you clump a lot of people together has the potential to increase poor behavior – or good behavior. But let’s face it, humans like to be mischievous. The thing with college is that you have tons of people clumped together who are feeling their oats, as it were. And there is far less supervision than they have ever had to deal with before. Suddenly they are dealing with very adult stuff like drugs, alcohol, sex, responsibility…it’s a lot to deal with as a young ‘un. I think our society may have forgotten about some of that craziness. It’s not a social media thing. It’s a people thing.
I agree that we are living in complex times and that Social Media is just a small part of the puzzle. I was in college in the 70’s and 80’s–well before AOL IM and the internet (all my college research was done in an actual, physical library!) Even then, word of anything seemed to spread at the speed of light. In addition to the “dorm system,” the Greek system was also an extremely expeditious instrument for broadcasting the latest gossip. I believe you are correct–social media is just the amplifier.
@KimStebbins Thanks Kim. Yes, hazing is a story all to its own, and often ends up just as tragically as the story of Tyler Clementi did. This is a story that is going nearly untold in our country, but kids are dying with frightening regularity because of problems like alcohol poisoning. These are things that social media can also amplify, but I think we need to deal with the core issues first.
I think that if we start “saving” our kids from dorm experiences we are doing them a disservice. It is a huge part of growing and learning. What we need to do instead is teach our kids how to treat people respectfully and kindly (which they learn from watching their parents). I imagine that Ravi learned some of his discriminating views at home. I would also add that social media isn’t as much of a culprit as MEDIA in general, through which we learn that there is no privacy. Look at the tabloids and reality TV. We are taught at every turn that we do not have a right to privacy.
@DalaiLina Great points. We can’t very well send kids to school in plastic bubbles, right? But there should be a way to prepare them for some of the stuff they are going to face. There should be training for situations like the one Clementi found himself in, with a roommate who was seriously invading his privacy. There should be people that students like Ravi could talk to, so they could say, “Hey, I’m living with a gay peer and I’m not comfortable with this.” It could be a great learning opportunity, I think.
I loved my dorm experience in college, won’t trade it! IMHO difference is we respected each other and their privacy. Not much bully way back when… That’s what I think has changed.