Have we reached peak internet solipsism?
Presented without comment from a New York Times news alert that’s been lingering in my inbox since October of last year:
The defendant, Steven J. Hayes, who, the testimony showed, described his eager anticipation of the crime with an “LOL” — laughing out loud — text message hours before taking part in murder, rape, kidnapping and arson at the home of the Petit family on Sorghum Mill Drive, was convicted of 16 of 17 crimes in all; he was acquitted of arson.
Emphasis added.
I was enjoying the New Yorker writeup of the ChatRoulette programmer until this stinker of a sentence. We’ve heard this story before, most loudly in the hullaballo following, “Exposed,” Emily Gould’s New York Times magazine cover story on personal blogging.
As he usually does, keyholez articulated my position on that “uproar” much better than I ever could. I thought we’d be past this by now. Online personas aren’t somehow opposed to “real” personas; this distinction is clumsy and not useful. They’re equally real extensions of our meatspace personas, and I look forward to the day when we’re all on the same page about that.
(via somethingchanged)
Being able to communicate more widely will always be a net positive. But it’s still hard to reconcile our progress with stories like these:
Anti-suicide advocates say that there has been more than one instance recently where a person killed himself on a Webcam as others watched. Papyrus, a charity in Britain that works to stop young people from killing themselves, says it has tracked 39 cases in that country alone where young people committed suicide after visits to “pro-suicide” chat rooms.
The only heartening part is that the creep in question was caught though “untrained, unpaid Internet sleuthing by Celia Blay, a 65-year-old from a tiny community in Britain,” even though it was already too late for a couple of people…
[d]anah [b]oyd is lucky enough to occupy a weird space between academia and the “establishment.” Holding that position allows you to throw Queer Theory into your (excellent) rant about FB’s privacy debacle:
Jeff Jarvis gets at the core issue with his post “Confusing *a* public with *the* public”. As I’ve said time and time again, people do want to engage in public, but not the same public that includes all of you. Jarvis relies on Habermas, but the right want to read this is through the ideas of Michael Warner’s “Publics and Counterpublics”. Facebook was originally a counterpublic, a public that people turned to because they didn’t like the publics that they had accessed to. What’s happening now is ripping the public that was created to shreds and people’s discomfort stems from that.
Borrowing from Adam Phillips’s Houdini’s Box: people once escaped to Facebook, now they’re escaping from Facebook…
(via somethingchanged)
Just sayin’…
Pretty illuminating compendium from the EFF.
from a comment on hacker news
Hacker News | Same goes for Apple and the uprising against their banning of non-native develop…
(via fred-wilson)
Kind of a snobby sentiment (at least the second half), but true for the most part?
