The Internet has given unprecedented access to information, but where do we draw the line? A new Web site invites users to share old college exams online. Is it cheating — or democracy?
Residents of Westchester, the neighborhood surrounding Loyola Marymount University, in Los Angeles, say microblogging services like Twitter are not only allowing students to find out where their classmates are partying, but also when the gatherings are about to be shut down by the police.
JuicyCampus, the controversial site that lets students post totally anonymous (and often malicious) comments about their college classmates, has launched a new version of its site and opened support to over 185 new campuses, with 500 expected by the end of the month. JuicyCampus is essentially a public, anonymous bulletin board that encourages users to gossip about eachother, often referring to their targets by their full names.
I know a girl who asked a boy to be her boyfriend via Facebook before they had even discussed the matter face-to-face. It was Gen Y's version of the omnipresent grade school love letter that read: "I like you. Do you like me? Check yes or no."
The Trolls Among Us: Weev (not, of course, his real name) is part of a growing Internet subculture with a fluid morality and a disdain for pretty much everyone else online.
Web designer Sean Tevis has raised more than $96,000 from nearly 6,000 people — most of whom aren?t from Kansas — in his bid to unseat Kansas state Rep. Arlen Siegfried.
Yet even as the police tightened security before the Games, the power of new information technologies to chip away at the official line was still on display. In a poor county in Guizhou Province in the south, a teenage girl died under mysterious circumstances, and rumors of police malfeasance and a cover-up spread widely on the Internet, prompting public protests to demand a new investigation.
In 1996, Congress enacted Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which provides immunity from legal liability for messages posted by anyone other than the operator or proprietor of a site or service. The presence of such a barrier goes far to explain why victims are frustrated, as most poignantly illustrated by Juicy Campus, a campus-gossip Web site.
Over on the blog bavatuesdays, a professor tells of a visit yesterday to the University of Richmond for a lecture that was interrupted by a lockdown following reports of a gunman on the campus. As the audience sat in a dark, locked room awaiting their fates, hoping and praying that tragedy wouldn’t befall another Virginia university, they began communicating and comforting each other via Twitter.
A joke about shooting fellow students, posted to a gossip Web site, led to the arrest of a Colgate University student this month.
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The Internet has given unprecedented access to information, but where do we draw the line? A new Web site invites users to share old college exams online. Is it cheating — or democracy?
Residents of Westchester, the neighborhood surrounding Loyola Marymount University, in Los Angeles, say microblogging services like Twitter are not only allowing students to find out where their classmates are partying, but also when the gatherings are about to be shut down by the police.
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