A High-Tech Shaming

This is just disgusting:

It started with a Twitter message on Sept. 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, the authorities say, the Rutgers University student 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, an 18-year-old freshman and an accomplished violinist -- jumped from the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River in an apparent suicide. 

The Sept. 22 death, details of which the authorities disclosed on Wednesday, was the latest by a young American that followed the online posting of hurtful material. The news came on the same day that Rutgers kicked off a two-year, campuswide project to teach the importance of civility, with special attention to the use and abuse of new technology.

I did a lot of dumb shit when I was young, but this is a kind of borderline misanthropy that it's really hard for me to relate to. As soon as I read about this case, I thought back to Laura Ingraham who pulled a similar stunt at Dartmouth. She evidently later apologized, and is now redeeming herself making racist jokes about the First Lady.

These kids are, as far as we know, just apolitically cruel. I don't think this qualifies as murder, and invasion of privacy seems about right. Likely, they'll be thinking about this for the rest of their lives. Or maybe not. Some of people are just built like that.