Technology responds to tragedy

CHICAGO —

Horrible, real-world happenings are unfolding almost simultaneously in the virtual world, as Virginia Tech students and people from all over the world gather online to grieve and vent.

From blogging to cellphone video, technology has forever changed the way we process and communicate about tragedy — in good ways, and perhaps bad.

Students at Virginia Tech — one of the most wired universities in the country — are posting harried, thoughtful, poignant messages that are as pressing as the photographs of the missing that lined the "Have You Seen?" walls of Grand Central Station hours after the Sept. 11 attacks, just as mournful as the television cries for help from the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Except it's all on the Web.

Almost immediately after Monday's deadly shootings, Virginia Tech students created an "I'm OK" page on Facebook to let one another and their loved ones know that they survived. Other students posted photos and cellphone video on their own sites, or shared it just hours after the shootings with news organizations.

The most compelling video of the massacre was taken with a student's cellphone and posted on CNN.com, where it has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times.

Thanks to the portability and speed of today's technology, the students' shots are likely to become some of the "defining images" of the tragedy, says Amanda Lenhart, a senior researcher at the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which monitors high-tech culture.

And nowhere, she says, has the impact of the Internet been seen more than on social-networking sites, most often frequented by young people.

Since Monday, there has been a nonstop flood of postings on the popular Facebook student site, on MySpace and LiveJournal, and on personal blogs — expressing everything from grief to anger to confusion.

So many people logged onto VTTragedy.com on Tuesday that Vy Le couldn't keep up with the traffic, and the site crashed. The visitors were not just the classmates that the Virginia Tech sophomore thought would want to access the memorial site in the aftermath of the campus shooting that left 33 people dead. There were people from around the world.

"Everyone wants to share their feelings with Virginia," said Le, 19.

Le says the site has consumed almost all of her time since the police let her back in her dorm after the shooting Monday morning. "It was the only thing I could do," Le said. "Everyone has something to say, an opinion, a feeling. I didn't want to just sit there and do nothing."

Students and strangers have poured out their sadness online, on Facebook, on message boards for Dave Matthews and other musicians, and on specially designed sites like Le's.

TechSideline.com, a site for VT sports fans, also quickly morphed into a meeting place where students, family and friends could communicate — especially when phones were jammed.

There are photographic memorials on Flickr, tributes set to music on YouTube and social-networking pages to honor the dead. People are posting on www.BiglickU.com, a joint site for Virginia-area colleges.

Katie Olson, 20, a sophomore studying communications, started the Facebook group "I'm OK at VT" on Monday morning. About 39,000 current students and alumni are on Facebook, a lot considering that Virginia Tech has about 26,000 full-time students.

Students also turned to the Web for dispatches from the Collegiate Times, their student newspaper.

Legacy.com, an online obituary service, set up a guest book for people to type in notes about the tragedy. It was in the process of establishing separate books for individual victims as the names were released Tuesday. About 8,000 people submitted entries in 24 hours, perhaps the largest outpouring the company has seen, said Hayes Ferguson, the CEO.

Kent Norman, a University of Maryland psychology professor who is writing a book on cyberpsychology, joined one of the online groups, called "Pray for Virginia Tech." Doing so helped him channel the sadness he felt, he said.

The school "had a memorial service, but only a few people can be there," Norman said. "I think the rest of the world wants to have expression, to give feedback."

Being online allowed 24-hour news access to the tragedy, he said. Now, "we need that media to help accommodate our grief. In the old days, people might have done it through snail mail and phone calls." But those processes are no longer sufficient, he said.

Even before names of the victims were officially released, a few students created Facebook memorial pages for some of the dead — though others worried that it was too soon, since family and friends were still being notified.

Jesse Connolly, a 21-year-old from Lynn, Mass., made a posting Tuesday on the MySpace page of Ross Alameddine, one of the VT students who died. The pair worked together last summer at an electronics store in their home state.

"If only you were here to read this Ross ... You'd know what an imaginative, intelligent, compassionate and most of all hysterically funny human being you were, and how appreciative I am to have spent last summer working with such a great kid," Connolly wrote. "My every thought is with you and your family."

"A lot of people look at the Web as a collection of funny videos, a place to write your own op-ed columns, for the most part a place of fun. They miss the fact that the Web, fundamentally, is about connection through conversation," says David Weinberger, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.

And as a show of support, many students, including scores from other colleges, replaced their Facebook profile photos with a VT logo shrouded in a black ribbon.

Patti Jacobs, a junior at Canisius College in Buffalo, N.Y., was among them. Saddened by the shootings, she went searching for memorial pages on Facebook Tuesday morning.

Jacobs was alarmed when she also came across several pages that included hateful, sometimes racist remarks toward shooter Cho Seung-Hui, other Asians and his family.

"This is not about just one guy and his problems," Jacobs wrote. "Yes — he alone is accountable for all the damage and pain caused yesterday — but the reason for this was not his race, his child-rearing by his family or his girlfriend breaking up with him...

"How much of our society is accountable as well?"

Some of the hateful postings were removed, likely after other Facebook users flagged them — a process of communal self-editing used on some sites.

Those kinds of entries are a product of the open nature of the Internet, where rumors and inaccuracies also can linger.

Such was the case for 23-year-old Wayne Chiang, who was mistaken by some as the shooter — partly because his Facebook profile includes references to graduating from Virginia Tech and several photos of him with his gun collection.

At first, Chiang says he "played along with it" on his personal Web page, partly to see how much money he could make, since payment from the ads he places on his site are based on the number of hits the site gets. (He claims he's going to donate the proceeds to a fund for the shooting victims at his alma mater.)

Chiang decided to post the truth after he received death threats. Despite technology's darker side, Lenhart at Pew says the help the Internet provides during tragedies like these is undeniable.

"No longer do you need to drive to a headstone in a cemetery or a roadside flower-strewn cross, or fly across the country to a funeral," she said.

Compiled from The Associated Press, Baltimore Sun, The Washington Post, The Orlando Sentinel, and USA Today.