Privacy and Morality

The world is a dangerous place.  The sooner this is realized, the sooner we can grow up and face it.  The people in it can change our lives: for better or worse, through the mind or physically.  In all this chaos of struggling through an uncertain future, the internet has only amplified the problems.

This amplification has occurred mainly through invasions of privacy.  While the growing concern of large internet companies taking our information online is a big deal, we can’t turn a blind eye towards our friends.  Sometimes, they are the cause of our misfortune.  We can spend so much time blocking unwanted attention from prying eyes, but in return we divulge our greatest secrets to the people outside of that realm.

I say this because of two examples of cyber-bullying that lead to suicide that we read this week.  The cases of Megan Meier and Tyler Clementi show just how real a virtual world can be.  [Please read/watch the video, because I’m about to go on a rant]  While it may be easy for strangers to say things to us, painful comments have a much greater sting when coming from people we trust.  This especially was present in Megan Meier’s story.  She trusted an internet friend, one whom she thought was the one bright spot in her life, and that person completely crushed her.  What makes the situation worse is that the boy she grew feelings for didn’t even exist; it was just an angry teen’s mother.  This not only crosses the line of trust in friends, but also shows just how sick the world can be.  Let’s start with the ‘feud’ between the two teenage girls.  Supposedly, they were friends before some event that separated them, which caused the other girl to say that Megan was mean.  At the age of 13, any type of debacle between friends is probably insignificant.

So now we’ve got a young girl crying about her friend that did something ‘bad’, and her mother wants to help out.  Instead of being an adult, doing the responsible thing and consoling her child, or conferring with Megan’s parents, she creates a false profile to get revenge on a teenager.  This is just unfathomable to me.  I’m positive that no matter what age I was, I would just say ‘move on’.  Revenge is a vicious cycle, and pointless.  No one wins.

The case with Tyler Clementi is a bit harder to put myself in.  The whole notion that someone could be watching you in your own room is a definite invasion of privacy.  But what sets it overboard is that he was caught in the act of something sacred to him: his sexuality.  It’s easy for me to say, regardless of sexual preference, that I wouldn’t be as drastic as he was in this situation.  I’d be embarrassed, have a talk with my roommate about his tendencies, but I wouldn’t commit suicide.  It’s not the end of the world.

But we’re all different people.  Some are open with their lives, leaving no detail out of public space.  Others rarely show their true self, only to a handful of their closest friends.  It’s a sensitive area for sure, but with the new innovations of video cameras, private and public lives can be crossed instantaneously.  His roommate had no right to broadcast Tyler’s affair, or even see it for himself.  Some things are on a need to know standard, and shouldn’t be crossed.

What I ask the most when thinking about this case is: What does Dharun Ravi (the roommate), have to gain by doing this?  Entertainment?  At what cost?  Things like this are what make me lose faith in humanity.

In the end, the problem is hard to solve.  On one hand, you could just quit the internet, and deal with the already enormous amount of problems in day to day life.  On the other, you can continue the usage of social networking sites, while always watching your step in what you say or do.  Both paths aren’t perfect solutions, but unless there’s a paradigm shift in the attitudes towards other people’s privacies, or just morality in general, there won’t be a better answer.

While I’m not one to shove ideas down throats, I will say this: wait.  As much as the musical Sweeney Todd isn’t for life lessons (unless slaughtering people for meat pies in a path for revenge against the man who took your daughter is now ok), there’s a line in one of the songs that says “Good things come to those who wait”.  Whether you’re waiting for that one person to come along and make your life better, or waiting to get out of the shadow of our past, the future is hope.  Life goes on, and so should you.