New Media and the Shooting at Dawson College
Within an hour of learning of the September 13 shooting at Dawson College in my home town of Montreal, I wrote a blog entry about my astonishment at receiving the news through the unexpected news medium of junk mail. I didn’t really reflect on my feelings about the shooting in that knee-jerk blog entry (nor will I now), but rather commented cursorily on the role that new media played in my remote reception of this terrible news.
Countless other commentaries on the part played by digital technologies in the Dawson tragedy have emerged in various media in the past month. Digital technologies have been integral to every step of reporting and reflecting on the event: cell phone lines in Montreal were jammed to the point of malfunction during and just after the shooting, digital cameras and camera phones shot first hand photos of the event, news spread like wildfire the minute reports hit the Internet (take my spam alert as an example), and reaction fired back as people expressed shock, fear, outrage, and grief on blogs, in chat rooms, over MSN Messenger, by text message, and so on. Within hours fingers were pointed at new technologies for nurturing the 25-year-old gunman’s development into a killer. Kimveer Gill was an avid player of first-person shooter games (Super Columbine Massacre RPG! was a favourite- for an interview with the game’s creator go to http://kotaku.com/gaming/danny-ledonne/feature-columbine-rpg-creator-talks-about-dawson-shooting-201829.php), and these have been blamed for fuelling his violent passions and honing his shooting skills. Gill kept a blog onto which he posted self-portraits of a would-be assassin and his weapons as well as rants about "hating the world and everything in it”. Law enforcement officials and news media sprung upon the site for clues into the killer’s psychology. Though the blog was pulled down within a day of the shooting, Gill’s photos and words have been copied, pasted, and proliferated around the globe through diverse media. Short films about the shooting have been posted on youTube and viewed by thousands, and an online condolence book for the family of Anastasia deSousa, the young woman killed by Gill, has circulated widely. Further, word is that the widespread use of iPods may be changing the nature of immediate response to such emergencies. Apparently a number of Dawson College students were oblivious to the shooting well into the attack because the music in their ears trumped the sound of gunshots all around them.
I don’t know quite what to say about all this but to reiterate a central theme of this course: this extreme example reveals to extent to which new digital technologies and mobile media are revolutionizing the way we receive, interpret, and produce information. Not only are these technologies the channels through which many of us communicate on an interpersonal level, they are also playing an ever more fundamental role in personal processes of common sense-making. Be it a soon-to-be killer cultivating aggression in a weblog, a grief-stricken community expressing bewilderment and sorrow in a web-based sympathy card, or an individual articulating confusion, anger, and awe in a collage of photos, videos, and sounds pulled from digital sources, new media technologies are increasingly the means through which we process all that life throws our way.
Countless other commentaries on the part played by digital technologies in the Dawson tragedy have emerged in various media in the past month. Digital technologies have been integral to every step of reporting and reflecting on the event: cell phone lines in Montreal were jammed to the point of malfunction during and just after the shooting, digital cameras and camera phones shot first hand photos of the event, news spread like wildfire the minute reports hit the Internet (take my spam alert as an example), and reaction fired back as people expressed shock, fear, outrage, and grief on blogs, in chat rooms, over MSN Messenger, by text message, and so on. Within hours fingers were pointed at new technologies for nurturing the 25-year-old gunman’s development into a killer. Kimveer Gill was an avid player of first-person shooter games (Super Columbine Massacre RPG! was a favourite- for an interview with the game’s creator go to http://kotaku.com/gaming/danny-ledonne/feature-columbine-rpg-creator-talks-about-dawson-shooting-201829.php), and these have been blamed for fuelling his violent passions and honing his shooting skills. Gill kept a blog onto which he posted self-portraits of a would-be assassin and his weapons as well as rants about "hating the world and everything in it”. Law enforcement officials and news media sprung upon the site for clues into the killer’s psychology. Though the blog was pulled down within a day of the shooting, Gill’s photos and words have been copied, pasted, and proliferated around the globe through diverse media. Short films about the shooting have been posted on youTube and viewed by thousands, and an online condolence book for the family of Anastasia deSousa, the young woman killed by Gill, has circulated widely. Further, word is that the widespread use of iPods may be changing the nature of immediate response to such emergencies. Apparently a number of Dawson College students were oblivious to the shooting well into the attack because the music in their ears trumped the sound of gunshots all around them.
I don’t know quite what to say about all this but to reiterate a central theme of this course: this extreme example reveals to extent to which new digital technologies and mobile media are revolutionizing the way we receive, interpret, and produce information. Not only are these technologies the channels through which many of us communicate on an interpersonal level, they are also playing an ever more fundamental role in personal processes of common sense-making. Be it a soon-to-be killer cultivating aggression in a weblog, a grief-stricken community expressing bewilderment and sorrow in a web-based sympathy card, or an individual articulating confusion, anger, and awe in a collage of photos, videos, and sounds pulled from digital sources, new media technologies are increasingly the means through which we process all that life throws our way.
posted by Anonymous at 1:05 pm
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