Two incidents have caught the nation's attention in the past two weeks. In one, a Rutgers freshman named Tyler Clementi jumped off the George Washington Bridge after his roommate filmed him having sex with another man and put the video online. In the other, a recent Duke graduate named Karen Owen sent a "senior thesis" rating her various sexual partners from the school's athletic teams to some friends, and — big surprise — it became an Internet sensation.
Now the perpetrators of the Rutgers bullying are being charged with invasion of privacy and Owen's old squeezes are lawyering up. Clementi's suicide brought shame to those who believed that something like this could happen in Laramie, Wyo., but never in as reliably liberal a place as New Jersey. Owen's presentation brought shock to those who believed that girls at Duke are not interested in having or talking about sex (a surprising number of people, as it turns out).
Both of these incidents involve sex, college students and the Internet, sure ingredients for media sizzle. But as scandals go, they are not at all on the same plane: one is an enormous tragedy made more potent by a similar incident at Johnson and Wales a few days later, not to mention the horrific torture of three gay men in the Bronx this past weekend, while the other is basically stupidity, with no clear-cut victims or villains but schadenfreude aplenty.
That would explain why the former has received continuous play in major national news outlets, while the latter has become a top headline, gleefully hashed and rehashed, on specialty blogs that see an "angle" in the story — Jezebel for women, Deadspin for athletes and Gawker for gossips. Although, The Wall Street Journal blog did do a point-by-point comparison of Owen's presentation and Tom Wolfe's fictional account of the college dating scene, "I Am Charlotte Simmons."
However uneven the scope and impact of the two incidents may be, at the core, they stem from the same issue. Cue the screeching about privacy — more specifically, how nobody our age values it, how the Internet is destroying it, how we're all frogs in Mark Zuckerberg's pot and he's slowly, slowly turning up the heat, boiling us alive, and we don't even notice it.
To say all college students have the same feelings about privacy — and the loss thereof — is reductive. Obviously, Clementi did not choose to put his sex life out there for all to see, whereas Owen may as well have put "PLEASE FORWARD TO ALL YOUR FRIENDS LOL" in the subject line. But what about the athletes whose (sometimes unflattering) personal details are out there in the world for all to see, especially those Duke lacrosse players who have had more than their fair share of negative publicity in the last few years?
We as college students may just be victims of the times. Growing up online, as we have, there's bound to be embarrassing stuff about us out there on the Internet, whether it's a Xanga from your angsty high school years, a Facebook photo from last week's party or, in one particularly unique and cringe-inducing New York City private school case, a New Yorker profile of your fourth grade class's Young Democrats club. Hence, unless we make a strongly concerted effort to be private, the best we can hope for is to find "ways of creating privacy in public," in the words of Danah Boyd '00, who gave a talk here on social media last Wednesday.
What's the moral of the story here? Don't have sex, you never know who's taking notes? If it didn't work for Hester Prynne or Bristol Palin, it probably won't work for Brown students. Besides, most people are not as cruelly perverse as Clementi's roommate, or as thoughtless and Internet-unsavvy as Owen, so jeremiads about what our generation's relinquishment of privacy can lead to are a little over the top.
We're navigating treacherous waters when it comes to personal information and the Internet, which is not to say that everyone should go out and delete everything they've ever put about themselves on the Web, as Owen did in the aftermath of her scandal. Never mind that this means that the only results from a search for her name will be related to "horizontal academics." But both Owen and Clementi teach us that privacy is a malleable concept and that we can lose control with dangerous rapidity.
The truth is, I don't know the moral of the story, except to be careful to balance the culture of overshare with the value of privacy and to remember that even in the brave new world of the Internet, actions have consequences.
Former Herald Opinions Editor Sarah Rosenthal '11 told you it was tangential.
