The Daily Blog

(Oct. 7) — It’s Internet 101: Don’t e-mail while drunk, sex-texting is never private and everything on the Internet never really dies. Before you hit that send button, remember you can’t take it back.

But it appears people still don’t get it. Latest case in point: a 2010 Duke University graduate who wrote a 42-page fake thesis, complete with PowerPoint, bar graphs and photographs, detailing her sexual adventures with 13 male athletes, whom she names. She called it “excelling in the art of horizontal academics” and sent it to three friends. One posted it on the Internet.

Now it’s gone viral, embroiling the prestigious North Carolina college in another sex scandal involving members of the lacrosse team.
So why, despite seemingly nonstop headlines about Internet behavior gone wrong and college seminars on the importance of thinking before sending, does such behavior persist? Especially when it can have grave circumstances, such as the recent case of a Tyler Clementi, a Rutgers University freshman who jumped to his death after his roommate and a friend streamed video of him having a homosexual encounter.”I talk with students all over the country, and I feel like I’m a broken record,” Justin Patchin, a criminal justice professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and co-director of the Cyberbullying Research Center, told AOL News. “They think of it as some high-profile media thing that couldn’t happen to them. Most of us would say, ‘Come on, you should have known that this would blow up.’ They just don’t get it.”

Part of the reason they don’t get it is because they’re young, immature and feel invincible, experts say. Another factor is the immediate gratification of sending something online, and the mistaken belief that no one outside of the recipient will ever see it.

“People are not using the part of the brain that requires judgment,” Seattle-area psychologist Linda Young told AOL News. “They’re using the part of the brain that accesses immediate gratification … things that provide 15 minutes of fame, or a sense of power or says ‘go ahead and put it out there.’ Then, with a click of the send button, it’s out there, never to be retrieved.”

Duke graduate Karen Owen compiled a list of 13 young men she slept with — most from the lacrosse team, which is still tainted by a 2006 scandal that saw a stripper falsely accuse team members of raping her — and created a bar graph ranking their sexual prowess (or lack thereof). She detailed sex in the university library during finals week, sex in cars and sex while drunk.

“In my blackout state, still managed to crawl into bed with a Duke athlete,” she wrote of one encounter.
After her “thesis” went viral, appearing on scores of websites, she told Jezebel.com she was horrified. “I regret it with all my heart,” she said. “I would never intentionally hurt the people that are mentioned on that.”

The sports site Deadspin said last week that it had redacted the athletes’ names after receiving e-mails from those on the list. The site also posted an e-mail it said was authored by Owen, who wrote: “Your inclusion of the real names are causing this awful situation to escalate even further and is actually starting to affect peoples’ lives in ways that go far beyond mere embarrassment. Remove the names immediately, or I will be adding your blog post to the list of things I discuss with my attorney when we meet.”

Too late, Owen tried to restrict access to social-networking site LinkedIn, according to Forbes.com, but a cached version is still available.

“There is so much regret involved,” Young said. She hears it all the time when dealing with young people. “At that moment, the student isn’t thinking about the consequences or what will happen down the road.” Even though students see news reports about cyberbullying and suicides, including Clementi’s.

“They will think about it for a short time with the horrible atrocity of the [Rutgers] student who jumped off the bridge, then in the privacy of their dorm room, they’ll go ahead and hit the send button,” Young said.

So what’s to be done?

Education, education and more education, experts say. Even if it’s repetitive. The phenomenon of instant access, paired with the age-old battle to think before one speaks, makes for a huge social problem.

“They don’t have the same sense of privacy as we did growing up,” Patchin said. “They think they can put a finger in the dike by deleting it or taking it offline. They don’t realize it’s there forever.”

Still, he notes, a recent study he did with Sameer Hinduja of Florida Atlantic University shows that “most kids are getting it.”

In 2006, only 39 percent of young people surveyed said they restricted access to their MySpace profiles. Three years later, Patchin said, that figure was 85 percent.

“So they’re learning,” he said. “It’s just taking a while.”