"The killings appear to have been skillfully engineered for maximum distribution, and to sow maximum dread, over Twitter, Facebook and mobile phones." This is could be one of the very stupidest things I have read in the immediate aftermath of the shootings, though I am sure I shall see much more ... and far more stupid.
The author, who specializes in writing about tech for The New York Times, engages in a rumination on the rapid spreading of information via social media in our age, and speculates on how "as a newshound," the killer anticipated and exploited this. What crap.
The killer was a 41-year-old, worked in the media, and lived his life -- like his contemporaries and others in the business -- online. How else would one communicate with the world? Envisioning his last-minute posting and videoing of his act as some devious scheme gives him far too much credit. While making a video of a killing is bizarre (though no more bizarre than having a range of delusional grievances that drive one to murder), in a social media-saturated world it means no more than posting a video of any other important life moment.
By no means am I saying, as has become obvious, that he wasn't contemplating and planning his actions for some time. He rented his getaway car weeks before, bought his gun and plenty of ammunition (But for what? No one seems to have an comprehensive, rational answer for that, nor in my opinion will they), and packed an assortment of items to aid in an escape (like a wig, a hat, and several license plates), not to mention his many and various online actions, but my point is that there is not the organized, devious, and clever planning that the writer describes. Vester Lee Flanagan showed the organizational skills of an eight-year-old packing to run away from home, not those of some criminal mastermind.
In the search for clarity, I turned to a friend who both practices and teaches clinical psychology. He has posted a very useful excerpt/summary of an excellent piece that drives directly to the sort of craziness that drove Flanagan to murder.
Put succinctly, he was an "Injustice Collector," the most recent in a line of such, and what may seem a carefully structured method is just an extended collection of deluded, angry complaints and intentions. "Whatever you do, don't cherry-pick quotes from a collector and believe it explains him," Dave Cullen writes. "They tend to state their motives emphatically, but they are mostly outbursts."
Now I should probably give the poor fellow at The New York Times a break. We all approach things from our own perspectives, and when confronted with something so outside of our experience and worldview, something so bizarre and alien as to be positively surreal, we try to box it up and organize so we can understand it. He writes about technology and the internet, and that's how he saw it. But like so many bright, deeply entrenched experts, particularly (and sadly) in journalism, he's lost the path in the depths of his expertise.
In my case, these recent, shocking, hopefully (though sadly not really) unique events have forced upon me, at least, a greater understanding of my role as a part of a news story.
As I said in my last posting, in the journalism business one must go into a disassociated state when dealing with the shocking, the catastrophic, the unimaginably sad. If you don't separate yourself from the reality of it all, you run the risk of being overwhelmed. Sometimes, this attitude can be quite callous and cynical; I refer to it as "telling dead baby jokes."
This is quite easy to do when the people involved literally have nothing to do with you. One is and rightly should be shocked by pictures of drowned children who died trying to flee war and privation, only seeking the most basic of life's needs: safety. But it's a Syrian child, half a world away in Turkey. It's easy to see that as tragic, but nothing to do with me, not in a direct sense.
Alison and Adam were people I knew. Their loved ones are people I know, and people I have had direct interaction with since the killings. They are people I want to help, to be gentle with. I need to cling to the visceral reactions I have to the events, and most important keep fresh that feeling, that moment of hesitation I experience when I contemplate using this picture or that description, fearing how cruelly sad or shocking it might be to my friends and their families. Every death, every horrible news story carries with it this entourage of secondary victims, and as I proceed to trundle through my work in the usual way, I've got to remember that for them this is a uniquely massive event. It may be just another story to me, but it is the central tragedy of their lives for them.
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”
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