(bellingham herald)

If you're 20 years old or younger, you probably grew up using computers, cell phones, iPods, and Facebook. Photos, for you, are images not necessarily printed on paper. CDs are old hat. You take digital - digital everything - for granted.

In such a world, how easy is it to record and be recorded, to share your - or someone else's - most intimate secrets by posting them on the Web?

All too easy.

Easy gathering and distribution of information are hallmarks of the digital age. They played out all too disastrously for first-year Rutgers University student Tyler Clementi.

Clementi committed suicide by jumping off the George Washington Bridge in New York on Sept. 22, three days after roommate Dharun Ravi, 18, allegedly made and streamed online a secret video of an encounter between Clementi and another man.

Clementi's body was identified Sept. 29. Ravi and Rutgers freshman Molly Wei, also 18, have been charged with invading his privacy, and Middlesex County, N.J., prosecutors say bias-crime charges are possible.

Clementi even said farewell via Facebook: "Jumping off the gw bridge sorry."

Clementi's death has spurred fierce debate, on and off campus and on the Internet, about social media, changing notions of privacy, and whether or not what happened was a crime...
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