Mr. Ravi spied by computer on his roommate, Tyler Clementi, and gossiped about him on Twitter, the jury heard. Mr. Clementi, an awkward violinist, had been “making out with a dude,” Mr. Ravi wrote on Twitter. Later, Mr. Ravi, an ultimate Frisbee player who seemed to thrive on attention, invited people to watch when Mr. Clementi again had a male visitor.

The prosecutor, Julia McClure, saw Mr. Ravi’s actions as far more than mischievous. She said they were “mean-spirited, they were malicious, they were criminal.”

But Steven Altman, Mr. Ravi’s lawyer, called him “an 18-year-old boy, a kid,” a college freshman who was not biased against his gay roommate but “didn’t know how to deal with it.”

Ms. Goldberg, the Columbia law professor, said the prosecution had posed an important challenge to the sense in many schools and colleges that youthfulness provided a kind of immunity for activities and speech in the online world. She said many students seemed to believe the ideas put forth by Mr. Ravi’s defense, that being a kid meant there were few limits to how offensive they might be when using digital devices.

“This reinforces that social media can cause great harm and that its misuse can be criminal,” Ms. Goldberg said. She said she expected that the lessons of the courtroom conviction would probably be studied broadly, including in discussions at college orientations across the country.

Defense lawyers said that once Mr. Ravi had decided to take his chances at a trial rather than pleading guilty, there were few options for the defense. The 15-count indictment and Mr. Ravi’s own videotaped acknowledgment of many of the facts gave the prosecutors a powerful arsenal.

The charges took note of the damaging fact that Mr. Ravi had tried to change electronic messages he had sent and seemed to encourage a witness to change her account.