This week while keeping up with the news I have realized how media-crazed our society is becoming and how our intense interconnectedness and our openness to share personal details in public forums may one day haunt us, and even have deadly repercussions as it did this week with the suicide of Rutgers student Tyler Clementi.
As outlets such as Facebook, Twitter and Blogs become more mainstream, the line of what is truly news worthy and what is personal becomes blurred, to a point where many people can not tell the difference.
I've been following the case of a freshmen student at Rutgers who secretly taped his roommate's sexual encounter and broadcast it live on the internet. The student, Dharun Ravi, 18, was asked by his roommate Tyler Clementi to stay out of the room for a few hours the night of September 19th while a guest came to visit. The New York Times reported that Ravi left on his computer's webcam and sent out a message from his Twitter account that said '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.”
With many students receiving each others updates on a minute to minute basis because of their mutual accounts on sites like Twitter and the rise of smart phones, many students at Rutgers were able to see this message and it quickly became a hot gossip item on campus.
Two nights after the initial incident, Ravi posted another online message saying “Anyone with iChat, I dare you to video chat me between the hours of 9:30 and 12. Yes, it’s happening again.”
In details released on September 29th, 2010, it was announced that Clementi killed himself by jumping off the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River on September 22nd. Clementi even left a pseudo-suicide note as a status update on his Facebook page '“Jumping off the gw bridge sorry.” I feel like this update, even as a final goodbye, illuminates just how committed we are to our social networks, and that maybe we as a generation are beginning to see them as an extension of ourselves in a very literal way.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/30/nyregion/30suicide.html?src=ISMR_AP_LO_MST_FB
That is a crazy story. But really what I want here is for you to deconstruct what you're reading not by content but by form. How did the writer present this story? was it character based? straight news? What kind of lede? what worked what didn't. Don't just give me the plots of the stories you're reading. For next time!
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