What Rutgers reveals is, yet again, that new technologies can facilitate new and more creative ways of being cruel to each other.
Steve Schultze has made some interesting comments about the recent suicide by a Rutgers student after an embarrassing video was posted on the Internet. Reacting to a media treatment that took the position that it is not the technology that led to this problem, it is us (human nature), Schultze argues that technology is a facilitator that sometimes brings out the worst of human nature. He observes that technology can often allow people to do things that they would never do in the real, face-to-face world, and we ignore this at our peril.