It's all fun and games until someone jumps off a bridge

Technology may have the ability to make our lives easier and help us to keep in touch with others. But it also has the ability to take actions that we haven't fully thought through all the way from initial impulse to final effect in the same amount of time that it once would have taken us even to set a chain of events in motion. In this respect, it has robbed us of our impulse to reflect and has coarsened many of us.

We have all sent the email that, had it been a letter, would have been torn up before we reached a mailbox. Many of us have posted a comment that, had we to say it to someone's face, we would reconsider.

And, two young people at Rutgers secretly webcast the romantic fumblings of Tyler Clementi, the roommate of one and the dormmate of the other. And that young man is now dead.

I don't think that these two people thought they were doing much more than playing a sort of prank. They surely hadn't planned on leading someone to commit suicide. But, especially in a world that moves so fast and via the medium of the internet, a small evil can quickly lead to a much greater one.