Today was one of those days--and we get only a few of these a decade, at least of this magnitude--where we can watch a news event unfold in real time, with new information coming in almost every second from various sources. For those of us who are both news and Internet junkies, the need to find out everything combined with the realization that it's almost possible to find out everything can be exhilirating, even on a day of profound tragedy.
These snapshots in time, spaced out year by year, also provide a miniature history of technological progress and of ways to report and disseminate news. The murders at Virginia Tech provided an instant recollection of the Columbine massacre, but people over age 50 might have been more likely to draw a parallel to the sniper murders at the University of Texas in 1966. There was no live TV coverage of that awful day, of course; just black-and-white footage shot on film. Columbine wasn't long ago at all; it was 8 years ago this week. But in Internet terms it was the Middle Ages. Google was still brand new. Major news sites existed, but video offerings were miniscule. The big revelation to come out of Columbine was the use of cell phones by students in the school--both for the purposes of letting people know they were OK, and for on-the-scene reporting of a sort.
A kind of milestone in Internet journalism was reached the following year when a Seattle man started a thread on Metafilter saying that he had just experienced an earthquake. This was the equivalent of an AP bulletin: the reporting of a legitimate news event to a worldwide audience, several minutes before even the earliest reports of the quake by cable news or by the actual AP. And of course, Spetember 11 was covered in every imaginable way--the first big story for the age of online video, and the event that did more than any other to kick off the blog boom. People wanted to talk about it, and Lord knows the Web was made for the chatty.
As I said, Columbine wasn't long ago, but few then could have predicted that a mere 8 years later, the most arresting images of another school shooting would actually be filmed by a phone. Facebook and MySpace, which weren't around for 9/11, provided an alternate way of finding community and letting loved ones know you were OK, a way that didn't tie up phone lines.
There's a similarity to the way all these big events are covered, and if you have the TV on the coverage for several hours, it's hard not to get irritated by the endless repetition, and not to feel sorry for the news anchors whose inexperience at dealing with breaking news can't be more obvious. Given that it was obvious at an early stage that this incident was one of the largest mass murders in American history, the slowness of the networks to understand the magnitude of what was happening was mystifying--not sure if this is because they've all more or less turned serious breaking news over to cable, or if they were put off by how long it was going to take to get one of their people to Blacksburg, Va. But I suspect if Cory Lidle's plane had hit a building a few blocks from their corporate offices again, they would have cut into their precious soaps a bit earlier.
Will this incident have lasting resonance in pop culture, as Columbine did? It's too early to say; the Texas shootings, tucked into the middle of the Vietnam War as they were, seemed to have relatively little cultural impact (younger people may only know the name of Charles Whitman from a classic scene in Full Metal Jacket). But it was another little advancement for ad hoc citizen journalism, and that could have some positive effects down the road. I know that my own online life would be very different today had September 11 never happened. For starters, I might not have this blog. Now that's positively George Baileyan in the level of tragedy averted.
