Rambling Gabbi

Last night, I had the great privilege of attending the launch of Lady Gaga’s Born this Way Foundation. This organization — led by the popstar, her mother, and several affiliates like the Berkman Center for Internet and Society — aims to use social media to promote positive interactions among teens online and offline. I see so much potential in this grassroots approach to promoting acceptance among students, especially because teens will enact the change themselves. Indeed, a paradigm shift towards tolerance would be salient and long-lasting if young adults and future generations led this movement. Furthermore, teens would find themselves empowered by such grassroots activity, and could disseminate an affinity for diversity among their parents, teachers, and other adult peers. Yet fostering this bottom-up development is difficult, and especially so for students like LGBTQ allies in severely homophobic schools.

This caveat brings me to my next point: Lady Gaga’s motives are clear and inspirational, but unfortunately, they could rub off as somewhat idealistic. Although I cannot remember the exact quote, I remember that Lady Gaga said something along the lines of “I wish that each middle and high school could have one tolerant and accepting student to inspire others,” as Oprah Winfrey interviewed her. This goal is a great step forward in youth empowerment; however, some tolerant students simply find themselves in school environments where they cannot openly express and promote their ideas of kindness and acceptance. A school with a rather homophobic populace is certainly not a safe place for a teen to assert their open-mindedness towards marginalized sexualities, nor is a demographically homogenous school an easy place to discuss diversity. One accepting and tolerant student per school is not enough. A group of accepting students, on the other hand, has more power and support to incite this cultural shift towards multilateral respect.

The three pillars of the Born This Way Foundation — Safety, Skills, and Opportunity (more thoroughly explained here: http://bornthiswayfoundation.org/pages/our-mission/) — emphasize the use of social media in assisting in grassroots mobilization and creating groups of empowered and kind students. Social media has the incredible ability to easily connect people with similar interests, and I look forward to seeing the BTW Foundation use this feature to connect local teens interested in diversity and acceptance. Grassroots organization is not only about encouraging one teen to take a stand for tolerance — it’s about encouraging a group of passionate teens to do so, and creating friendships in the process.

Needless to say, I’m excited to see where the BTW Foundation goes with their grassroots efforts! I enjoyed reading the Kinder and Braver World Project’s working papers (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/7491) because they’ve given me a glimpse of where Lady Gaga’s foundation will go with their youth empowerment efforts. 

Finally, a shout-out to John Palfrey, who gave me this amazing opportunity to attend the launch of the BTW Foundation!

P.S. I still have so much more to say about this launch event, but my exam week is coming up and I’ve been held captive by my physics final (GRR Physics!) I’ll have more to post later!

The events leading up to Tyler Clementi’s tragic suicide were vague, but this extended New Yorker article finally compiles all of the mishaps (many on social media) that preceded Clementi’s life-changing decision. It’s heartbreaking to read — and even more difficult to interpret — but this piece is something that has greatly clarified one of the most complex deaths of my time. Indeed, Dharun Ravi does not come off as the intensely homophobic student that the media often portrays him as. Instead, he appears to be somebody intrusively fascinated with his roommate’s sexuality. Either way, though, his actions led to a tragedy, and one that will remain imprinted on people’s minds for years, if not decades.

The It Gets Better Project, which was primarily operated with the English language, will soon undergo some language translations. As a result, LGBTQ teens and allies of more than 20 languages will be able to receive support from this initiative. 

I still wonder: with the international community’s improved accessibility to the It Gets Better Project, how will varying cultures perceive and utilize its support and resources differently? Currently, time can only tell. Still, differing uses of social media amongst LGBTQ teens and allies of diverse nations is a rich topic still left undiscussed. 

While LGBTQ youth can often find sources of support online, they can just as easily run into homophobic material online. And just as supportive videos like Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” can go viral, so can LGBTQ-phobic material. One example of a viral anti-LGBTQ video is the one above, in which a girl scout calls for a boycott of girl scout cookies because the girl scouts organization is supportive of transgender scouts. While videos like these draw very public ire from LGBTQ individuals and allies, they still can emotionally harm many youths. I wonder whether (and hope that) the widespread criticism towards these videos nullifies the video’s hateful language. 

… but my blog certainly isn’t. I’ll be back soon!

I’ll be back in a few days! I’m currently on page 18 — 12 pages left to write!

Randi Zuckerberg, Facebook’s marketing director and sister of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, recently stated that supposedly the best fix for cyberbullying is removing all anonymity online. Claiming that “people behave a lot better when they have their real names down [and that] I think people hide behind anonymity and they feel like they can say whatever they want behind closed doors,” Zuckerberg thinks that exposing cyberbullies would dramatically curb online harassment and hate speech.

Indeed, Zuckerberg’s recommendation may make actions on the internet more salient in real life, and can subsequently lessen the prevalence of homophobic comments and other forms of hate speech online. People seem less likely to post risky and inflammatory statements online if those acts can be linked to their offline lives and appearances. Yet a lack of anonymity online can also present complications for the management of cyberbullying.

Tyler Clementi’s tragic suicide was triggered by online bullying, and more specifically, bullying in the form of public “outing.” His personal privacy was breached when his roommate, Dharun Ravi, used the social network Twitter to circulate an intimate video disclosing Clementi’s sexuality. At the time, Clementi was unprepared to come out as gay. His “outing” on Twitter came prematurely, and he was ultimately unprepared to deal with its effects. Although Clementi was able to cope with Ravi’s first circulated video, the second time Ravi uploaded a personal video of Clementi to Twitter, Clementi (posting on an LGBTQ-oriented internet forum) said that act “really set him off.” Clementi’s loss of privacy led to insecurity and eventually, suicidal feelings.

For Tyler Clementi, the loss of online anonymity was harmful, and public “outings” online have emerged as a new type of cyberbullying. While Randi Zuckerberg is correct in saying that no online anonymity facilitates the finding the culprits behind online hate speech, homophobia, and cyberbullying — Ravi, Clementi’s roommate, was easily found as guilty for contributing to Clementi’s death due to his lack of anonymity on Twitter — an absence of online privacy is also threatening to some. Many LGBTQ individuals used simple and text-based 1990s and 2000s-era internet chatrooms to anonymously experiment with different identities in order to fully realize their own. With social networks like Facebook and Twitter increasingly becoming an online extension of real-life social circles, individuals have lost the ability to anonymously experiment with identity. Social networks are now strongly connected to reality, and while this new online transparency provides a means of finding and stopping cyberbullying, this loss of anonymity also deprives LGBTQ individuals the opportunity to freely express themselves online without fear of real-life repercussions.

Mike Glatze, founder of LGBTQ community website Young Gay America

Profile-based social networks, such as Facebook, often ask users to disclose personal details such as gender. Facebook gives its users two options for describing gender: male or female. For individuals who feel uncomfortable describing their gender in binary terms and would rather identify themselves as genderqueer, Facebook’s gender options are too limited, and may even serve as a subtle reinforcement of heterosexist beliefs.

Google+, Google’s new social network, recently introduced an option other than male or female for describing gender. With Google+, genderqueer-identified individuals can use the term “other” to describe gender. Additionally, if one identifies as “other” for gender, the social network changes pronouns like “his or her” to “their” in communications in order to coordinate with a user’s identified gender. 

Profile-based social networks indeed pose complications for people who think that a website’s given descriptions for gender and sexuality are inadequate. Yet these sites have begun to evolve so that they can accomodate marginalized genders, and the dynamic nature of online social networking services suggests that Google+’s adaptation to genderqueer needs is merely the beginning of a new and non-binary approach to defining LGBTQ identity online.

Above is the video that started the It Gets Better Project, an initiative created by Dan Savage, a newspaper columnist and media pundit. The It Gets Better Project consists of YouTube users who upload videos in order to reach out to LGBTQ youths, to encourage them to stay strong and cope with the struggles that their school, peers, and families may present, and to remind distressed LGBTQ individuals that life will get better once they live through their adolescent hardships. Ever since the It Gets Better Project began, calls to an LGBTQ-oriented suicide hotline, the Trevor Project, have increased by 50%, and the original It Gets Better video has received over 1.5 million views. The initiative is indeed a tremendous success story of using modern social media sites to broadcast a message to an infinitely large audience. 

But rewind back to the 1980s and 1990s, when the internet was still a nascent computer technology. Multi-User Domains were one of the most popular social networks at the time. Also known as MUDs, Multi-User Domains were virtual realities where people could assume an online persona, enter an virtual environment, and live a parallel life that entirely consisted of text on a screen (the internet was not capable of supporting graphics yet). And similar to how rooms exist in our lives and divide people into space-bound groups, MUDs also were divvied into different areas where people could only communicate with others in their vicinity. Whenever one discussed LGBTQ matters in a MUD, it could never reach beyond the walls of the room where the discussion was contained.

Today, virtual walls no longer restrain conversation. With sites like YouTube and Twitter — which are open spaces for user-generated material, whether it be videos or 140-character messages — the sites’ content can reach anybody with an internet connection. Such social networking services have facilitated the act of reaching out to and supporting LGBTQ individuals, and have let grassroots initiatives like the It Gets Better Project provide support and advice to an innumerable number of LGBTQ youths.