In 1988 Laramie, a picturesque little city in Southeastern Wyoming was put momentarily on the national map as the site of the notorious homophobic murder of 22 year old University of Wyoming college student, Matthew Shepard.
Shepard was gay and on the night of October 7 he was brutally tortured to death by two Laramie boys who had met Matthew in a local bar and had led him to believe that they were gay.
Matthew had been lured outside into a desolate field, tied to a wire fence and beaten to death.
Over the next few months Laramie was transformed from a quiet town into an object of media attention; the Shepard story was told and retold till it emerged into a tragic saga that found place in plays, films, songs (one by Sir Elton John) projects of social activism and documentaries. An anti-hate crime bill, named the Shepard bill, was passed in Congress in 2008.
But the world of Laramie in 1988 was very much the pre-digital, old world, so the story of Shepard took a while to spread and a demand for an alleviation/eradication of a homophobic culture was made slowly but surely. In the absence of social media the process now looks long drawn, gradual and human, in retrospect.
On the night of August 11, 2012, an inebriated high school girl from West Virginia was sexually assaulted for about six hours by her peers in the town of Steubenville, Ohio. The act was well-documented by those who stood and watched and videotaped the scene, as well as tweeted episodes out in the grotesque language that only testosterone-driven high schoolers on drugs and alcohol can produce.
The catapulting of Steubenville, from an obscure little town with a fanatic devotion to its high school football team, to a globally reviled place nicknamed "rapeville", was overnight. The instrument of this catapulting was social media. Had it not been for the Instagram images, the Youtube videos, the facebook updates the tweets, and the textings, the trial itself would not have taken place.
The evidence presented in court against the rapists consisted mostly of data gathered from social media because the victim claimed to have no memory of those six hours.
Though social activist and crime blogger Alexandria Goddard initially exposed the rape, it was the (in)famous hacking collective Anonymous that helped the case gain unprecedented momentum.
According to The New Yorker Magazine
[...] since it came to prominence, in 2008, for pursuing the Church of Scientology, [Anonymous] has staged cyber attacks on MasterCard and Sony, and on the governments of the United States, Nigeria, and Turkey. It is an amorphous and mutable collective. According to a video statement recorded by an Anon, as affiliates refer to themselves, “There is no control, no leadership, only influence.” Its membership extends from the libertarian right to the far left, united by the belief that many institutions are inherently corrupt, or at least incompetent, and that the Internet provides the means to strike back from behind a digital cloak.
The New Yorker story "Trial by Twitter," suggests that Anon single handedly pressured the state of Ohio to bring charges against the culprits through a mixture of fear, coercion and blackmail. They are also said to have brought the entire community to its knees, as it were; Steubenville was besieged, if residents are to be believed, by forces from the digital world they were not familiar with.
In an essay, "The Revolution Will Not be Tweeted," Malcolm Gladwell writes of the inadequacy of social media as a tool for bringing real social change. The role of social media in the Steubenville case shows that the tool can't radically alter existing social orders, yet it can expose social ills and injustices that would otherwise remain concealed or hidden from the world's eyes.
Were it not for twitter, the rape of Steubenville would've remained a local incident. It's now part of a global discourse on the culture of rape and violence against girls and women, to such an extent that Nicolas Kristof (in an NY Times column) compared the rape to the horrific rape and murder of a young woman in Delhi. Social media has affected a kind of parity between Steubenville and New Delhi; where rape is concerned, we were denizens of a flat world.
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