you may be wondering
If you have been watching the tags for my del.icio.us account, you may see that there is quite a bit about school shootings and violence, including Columbine. Don’t worry, I don’t think I’m becoming obsessed but what I am seeing, across the stories of Columbine and Virginia Tech, are the ways in which technologies have changed in the eight years since, and the impact of those technologies on the lives of students. This isn’t some sort of diatribe against the Internet — or just about onling gaming and violence, but a sense that technologies have been integrated into students’ lives in complex ways. Students are supporting each other online, and reaching out to create connections across vast distances. On the other hand, the killers in both situations intentionally manipulated media through a sense of mania — used video, online postings, and their own writings to create a picture of themselves as anti-heroes, leaders in a world marked by violence, and martyrs to a hierarchical world. This may not make much sense yet, but I do think there’s a larger story here about the shifts in what it means to be a teenager in less than a decade.
Really what I’m saying is that I think that by looking at Columbine and Virginia Tech, we can see the positive and negative ways teenage life is now marked by technologies. These two terrible events can be seen as flash-points around which all the good and bad aspects of adolescence in the 21st century coalesce. Or something like that.