New twist on hate crime

[deBeauxOs]

    From here, and elsewhere.

It started with a Twitter message on September 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, authorities say, the student at Rutgers University in New Jersey 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, 18, an accomplished violist - jumped from the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River.

 

[lagatta]

That is just so unspeakably cruel.

[Antonia]

I have come to the conclusion, given shit on Facebook like the Pitt Meadows rape, the IDF soldiers with prisoners, even a lot of the ''protesters'' who showed up merely to video G20 violence, etc., that the younger generations, which has now grown up with digital technology, YouTube and reality programming have a warped view of what's fair game.

In fact, that sounds like a story idea.

[skdadl]

Add in the "Collateral Murder" video, Antonia. One of the most striking and disturbing things about that vid is the voices of the kids -- and they aren't much more than kids -- in the helicopters. Lemme shoot now; c'mon, lemme shoot. To them, it's a video game, and that's how they kill.

[Antonia]

I have not been able to bring myself to watch that one, actually.

But I have been thinking about sex tapes.

[brebis noire]

That story is absolutely heartbreaking. I don't even want to think about what his parents must be going through.

[deBeauxOs]

...the younger generations, which has now grown up with digital technology, YouTube and reality programming have a warped view of what's fair game.

In fact, that sounds like a story idea.

A serious absence of empathy/compassion doesn't even begin to explain the reason for such alienation and cruelty.

[Antonia]

It's not about lack of compassion -- although obviously there is a decided lack of it.

What it is IMO is this day and age's version of a whisper campaign. Ten, 20, 30 years ago, had a similar situation happened in the sense of the sex act getting overheard or accidentally walked in on or something, the end result might have been the same. Whisper, whisper, suicide.

The difference now is the reality TV and Facebook everything aspect of it.

 If anything goes in the Big Brother household, if everybody has a camera, UStream and access to YouTube, then -- in the mid of the people who grew up in a world where TV validates existence -- this is no more cruel than gossip.

[skdadl]

What it is IMO is this day and age's version of a whisper campaign. Ten, 20, 30 years ago, had a similar situation happened in the sense of the sex act getting overheard or accidentally walked in on or something, the end result might have been the same. Whisper, whisper, suicide.

I remember a few whisper campaigns, although none that ended in suicide. The one I know best I wasn't even around for at the start. A few years before I met my husband, a woman walked in on him and another guest in the middle of a party at his place, and instead of just backing out and maybe whispering to her partner or something, she went tearing downstairs in a panic and announced to, I dunno, sixty people?, what was going on.

Anyway, for years that was part of R's lore. When I first got entangled with him, I cannot tell you how many people sidled up to me and said, "Has anyone ever told you about ...?" Fifteen years later, when I first started working with people in Montreal, I was getting emails from them asking "Has anyone ever told you ...?" Jebus.

Luckily, early in our entanglement, I had heard that story from R, except in such a wonderful context. It happened because, in a group conversation in the kitchen, the woman involved (whom you would know; she's dead now, but I won't name her) had said jokingly, "Oh, I'm at that age where no one is ever going to invite me to bed again," and R being R said immediately, "Oh, you think so?" That's how it happened. I thought that was nice. It didn't bother either him or her -- they knew they'd been, ah, exposed, but afterwards they went downstairs and danced. They only saw each other once more before she died, and it was apparently just social and civilized.

In their case, they were both older, fairly worldly people, he in his forties and she in her fifties. So they had the confidence to face down the sniggers and whispers. That people would continue to whisper years later, though, and to make sure that I heard about it again and again -- that struck me as the bad part.

It's true too, though, that video streaming the whole thing to the whole world is worse. People haven't really changed, but the tech does make it worse in that sense.