Opinion: How Social Media Killed Tyler Clementi

(Oct. 1) -- This is what we have been incessantly told:

We are not just consumers of media, we are creators of it.

We're all reporters and journalists today. We're all content generators.

In this context, the tragic suicide of Tyler Clementi isn't as much surprising as inevitable.

His death is a story of what happens when two ordinary, probably decent people get swept up in the notion that the world exists for our manipulation and delectation -- to be proliferated through whatever channels we have available -- while we stay safely and remotely removed from harm. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, YouTube -- they are all unmediated platforms for whatever runs into our brains, or whatever our brains run into.

The storyline is brutal in its simplicity. Tyler Clementi, a Rutgers University student, jumped off a bridge on Sept. 22, three days after a video of him having gay sex -- shot by a hidden camera allegedly installed by his roommate -- was streamed on the Internet. Clementi's roommate, Dharun Ravi, and another student, Molly Wei -- both of whom are 18 -- have been charged with invasion of privacy and could face up to five years in prison.

What would permit someone to elevate the college prank to something so morally heinous, so palpably vicious? Something not motivated by either anger or revenge, but by a sense of, well, let's say "media entitlement"?

It's the culture, stupid.

Today's social media world prides itself on an ethic of sharing. It runs on an amped-up immediacy that races ahead of our ability to reflect, judge and consider. We post, we comment, we exchange in what is increasingly a new kind of reflex behavior. In terms of brain biology, what happens is that our ability to calmly consider is pushed down by a deeper instinct. And the "automatic" part of our brain -- which is the most ancient system -- jumps ahead of the "reflective" part.

Clementi's tormentors didn't stop to consider their behavior because a fish doesn't know the water. They were so accustomed to functioning in a world obsessed by the addictive power of instantaneity that they lost perspective and balance.

We see millions of far-less-tragic examples of that every day, each time an e-mail is sent with dangerous haste, or the brain-to-keyboard-to-comment synapse operates without brakes.

Paradoxically though, just as the Internet and social media create a world that is infinitely more intimate, it makes it easy and slippery to perceive ourselves as spectators -- increasingly deadened to the consequences of our actions because we're all participants in an ongoing, real-time media experience.

It's what Neal Gabler wrote about so brilliantly in his post-McLuhan book, "Life: The Movie -- How Entertainment Conquered Reality." As the Columbia Journalism Review of the book put it, Gabler "sets forth the notion that entertainment values have come to dominate not only the mass media but also personal conduct, turning American life into the cultural equivalent of a movie."

Distance provides emotional safety. The same buffer that technology offered Clementi's videographers is a criticism often leveled against the drone attacks on Pakistan. There's no doubt that remote killing is easy and sanitized; you can be sure that if someone had to stand in the corner of the bedroom and film the sex scene, Tyler Clementi would be alive today. Instead, a drone camera was installed and the video automated. Remote killing is what happened in Rutgers.

When you live in a media hall of mirrors, a land of reset buttons and Photoshop retouching, no one gets hurt and nothing is forever.

Meanwhile, true to the culture of unencumbered sharing that ended his life, there's a Facebook group that pays tribute to the life of Tyler Clementi.

Last time I checked, it had 25,561 members who said -- about the tribute -- that they "Liked this."

Adam Hanft, founder and CEO of Hanft Projects, is a nationally known authority on consumer marketing, business strategy and social trends. He has written for The Huffington Post, Politics Daily, The Daily Beast, Fast Company and the Barnes & Noble Review.