Rashomon On Steroids: Virginia Tech Massacre Shows Power of Collaborative Media

If anything shows the awesome power of collaborative media technology, it is events like today's massacre at Virginia Tech. As a gunman executed students in a dorm room and in nearby classrooms, other VT students sent out frantic email and chatroom messages to their hometown news outlets all over the world--all while locked in their rooms. Meanwhile, a campus area news blog (Planet Blacksburg) bested all the world's mainstream news media in their on-the-spot coverage of the crisis.

Like the famed movie, Rashomon, by director Akira Kurasawa, collaborative media technology allows a vast audience to see the same crime from multiple points of view--and to draw our own conclusions about what has happened. But this is "Rashomon on steroids," one could say, since we are now not just getting 4 perspectives, but hundreds and hundreds of perspectives. All at once. Higgledy-piggledy. Does this make us a more informed populace? Does it add wisdom to the policy decisions that will inevitably get made in reaction to the crime? Probably not. Does it give us more information? Definitely. Does it give us better information? Maybe, though no corpses will be revived by use of digital communications. But maybe more minds will be changed about the proper response to this kind of tragedy. Only time will tell.

This incident makes me think of many things, but one thought kept sticking in my head as I read coverage from around the world. . .this kind of thing happens in Occupied Iraq and other global hotspots every single day. Yet such incidents don't usually get the kind of rightfully outraged coverage that a similar mass killing in the U.S. is accorded. More's the pity.

Anyhow, my thoughts are with the victims and their families. And I think it's critical that the U.S. think of ways to stop this kind of senseless slaughter from happening again in the future. It's just not acceptable that one lone nut--who it will probably turn out got jilted by a girlfriend or felt picked on by other students or had parents that forced him to get As his whole life until he finally snapped--gets to extrovert his probably inevitable suicide to such an extent that he takes over 30 innocent people with him.

Update: This report features the actual sound of the gunshots in the classroom building captured on video by a student with a cellphone. Very hard to sit through.

Update 2: Virginia Tech students have created "Hokies United" groups on the social networking site, Facebook, which they can join to show their friends and loved ones that they survived the massacre. If you have a Facebook account, you can see the groups here (this group actually lists some of the name of known dead) and here.

Update 3: The instant message trail of a student trapped in a nearby classroom during the incident can be found here.