More Silence Than a Moment

I applaud their gesture of the moment of silence today for Tyler Clementi.

Interesting the reactions that have come out of the participatory media at Rutgers, and the outpouring of general news coverage. Google can map that for you with trending topics and key facts. I don't have to look for the Wikipedia entries; I have total faith they are already there.

At the center of it, is a family that is now destroyed by the networked media. The Borg that is our information nexus has consumed first their precious talented boy, and now threatens to do the same with his family.

We won't mean to destroy them. We'll say the investigations into how it happened are necessary, will honor his memory, will make his death have meaning, will bring justice to those who did the deed.

It's all crap. Even sitting here attempting to bring some sense into the broader impact, I feel at best voyeuristic and in my heart, an opportunist using the Clementi's tragedy as an intellectual fulcrum.

Perhaps the silence we need isn't a moment. As Luddite as it sounds, tolerance for sexual preference shouldn't be what we are mourning or considering -- acceptance of the small slivers of privacy left to us by an increasingly limitless world.

I hazard to guess that 20 years ago, Tyler would not be dead. He would be terribly wounded by the actions of his dorm mates -- if they had managed to make a film or video tape of him. But the chances of that happening would be reduced by the lack of stealth of late 80s, early 90s equipment.

His reaction could have been the same to this brutal outing, but the likelihood that anyone beyond the immediate dorm or Rutgers community would have known about it in that pre-network time would be nil. Today, it approaches a virtual infinity.

We have done it to ourselves. Many volunteer for the kind of invasive public life through Facebook, by Tweeting out thoughts, by dropping Four-Square location details. We overshare our Flickr and YouTube private moments, and join with digital companions scattered across the country in on-line games.

In a mad, head-long pursuit of community and belonging, we overlook the way that our new "social-ism" has this dark side. What a rush we get from our networked world, where we can say things, and do things, and be people we aren't behind screen names and avatars. No wonder the comedy cliche rings true -- there are only two business that call their customers "users": drug dealers and computer manufacturers.

Oh we celebrate The Social Network movie coming out this weekend. The sickening irony of that -- Tyler's last words posted on Mark Zuckerberg's great invention. A movie that is fiction, but we will believe it to be true; like so many convinced that Oliver Stone's JFK is gospel. Tyler's feelings weren't virtual; he was face-to-face with embarrassment in the real world.

At the end of the day, the difference between these two talented young men? Mark's still with his pre-college girlfriend, not the high-life Playmates of the movie. He also has about a $1 billion reasons to compensate for the loss of his privacy and the distortions of his real life.

Tyler has a moment of silence. An empty orchestra chair. A grieving family.

Mark -- and all of us digiratti -- get one more thing.

Tyler's blood on our hands.