Everyone is obviously shocked about the suicide of Tyler Clementi, an 18-year-old music freshman at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Last week, he jumped from the George Washington Bridge days after he had been secretly videotaped in an intimate encounter with another male in his dorm room.
As if this weren’t shameful enough, the footage was webcasted by his roommate.
As an opinion columnist, I’d be parroting the same words that can be found in the nationwide media if I approached this event through the gay cause or under the  label of “Internet bullying.”
I can’t do that.
The idea of using such a tragic event in favor of a specific cause — be it loosely or deeply related to the incident — doesn’t sound right to me.
From webcasting the poor guy’s date to posting his own imminent suicide on Twitter, the case shows us that there’s more to social networking than is dreamt of in our post-modern philosophy.
Clementi was clearly a sensitive person. Friends say he was a nice guy who wanted to succeed as a musician — he was a violinist. Also, he was shy and mostly kept to himself, according to colleagues from Rutgers interviewed after his suicide.
But claims that if the webcasted encounter had been a heterosexual one the suicide wouldn’t have happened are highly debatable.
I don’t like the term “bullying” or even “Internet bullying.” I think plain “ignorance” is more accurate.
Several organizations and campaigns that fight to bring a greater awareness of how the Internet is affecting our perception of life say this kind of ignorant behavior is on the rise.
According to the New York Times, Rutgers itself had started a campuswide campaign on the same day of the suicide to teach the importance of civility with a special focus on the use and abuse of new technology.
Obviously being a university student doesn’t mean you are automatically an educated person.
It’s strange to me that the suicide allegedly happened after an Internet crime.
More intriguing is that apparently the only help he looked for was also on the Internet on the JustUsBoys.com website where he posted questions under an alias asking what to do after he discovered his roommate was exposing his sexuality against his will.
Abuse, bias and mistreatment are not new things. No matter how many aggravating conditions we can find in such a tragic event, similar circumstances are being created everyday for sad stories like Clementi’s.
It’s easy to find shadows of the same circumstances involving this kind of abuse. Remember the arrest of an LSU student in April for taping the girls’ shower room at a gym with a pen camera? How about an entire movie based on webcasting a teenager’s first night of sex to friends?
And perhaps worst of all: Our own inability to realize that all kinds of people need help to go through different moments of their life, even if they don’t say so.
Don’t take Tyler Clementi as a martyr of gay movements or campaigns on how dangerous the Internet is. Gay rights and acceptance need to be acknowledged. The Internet can be dangerous, that much is known already.
What we don’t seem to realize yet, and apparently Tyler didn’t either, is how precious and fragile life is.
Marcelo Vieira is a 32-year-old jazz cello graduate student from Brazil. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_Mvieira
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Contact Marcelo Vieira at [email protected]