Blogs ftw

The comparisons to Columbine are inevitable. The words “Virginia Tech” are going to mean something to this generation. That meaning would be totally unique if we hadn’t had Columbine first. We may go down in history as the school shooting generation. We haven’t outgrown school violence. I wonder if there will be office place shootings when we are in our 30s.
One difference between Columbine and Virginia Tech for me was the complete ease in getting information this time around.
I first heard about it while we were sitting in this class, last week. An hour and fifteen minutes I met friends for lunch and pulled out my laptop, proud to be the first one to tell them what was going on. Before we separated for our respective classes we had the most up to date death toll, thought the gunman had been shot by police, knew that he was Asian and had watched the cell phone video three times. By the end of my next class I had witnessed the real-time online drama of the “gunman’s blog.” It only took a couple of hours for him to post that he has not the shooter.
By the next day I found myself arguing with my friend over the ethics of facebooking the dead, then doing it anyway. We had both already facebooked the killer, there was no debate there. That afternoon I read the first screenplay, a few hours later the second surfaced. That night I downloaded three studio-quality Virginia Tech tributes by various artists. They must have run to the studio to put them out so fast.
The interesting thing was the last place I always looked was a news organization’s Web site. I went to a blog, then to facebook, then a music sharing blog, back to blogs, most guiltily - to Wikipedia. The only time I looked at The New York Times or CNN.com was to see the death toll. That’s what I perceived the newspaper and cable news network to be best for. They weren’t reporting the hoax, facebook messages, or anything else I really wanted to see. In the next few days I would look to newspapers for information on the killer and victims, but it was mostly stuff I had heard before. I had to chuckle a little at an article in the New York Times discussing the online explosion of information surrounding the shooting. It covered everything I had already seen, the hoax, the screenplays, his “manifesto,” and a Wikipedia entry that could have put every journalist in America out of business. It was a well-written and interesting article, but it was 4 days late. The NBC editorial debate was an interesting juxtaposition to the blogosphere. Out in the ether of the people’s medium, every scrape of information was instantly available, with commentary and affiliate links. And all this was happening while NBC wondered how much information we, the public, could handle about Cho. I was so disappointed to visit nbc.com and find some measly “excerpt” and pixilated cuss-words. I felt like my quest for information had been halted – by journalists. I longed for bloggers who put it all out there and didn’t wonder what I could handle.
Maybe the “office place shooters” of the future will know to send their manifestos to The Smoking Gun or PostSecret.