Illustration: Sun Ying

If there was one major difference between the horrific shootings in Colorado and Wisconsin, and the earlier shooting at Columbine, it was the role of social media. Although the Columbine shooting occurred over 13 years ago, social media has completely transformed the way Americans and the world observe and react to news. Moments after the first shot was fired inside the Aurora theater, tweets and instant messages were crisscrossing the Internet. While news agencies were still grappling with the events, social media was allowing the entire world, from Colorado to Beijing, to experience the events in real time.

Furthermore, this vast expansion of news sources resulted in an inundation of information in the hours and days after the shootings. From the New York Times to personal blogs, the crimes in Wisconsin and Colorado were covered more intensely than some wars have been.

However, this saturation on social media and news networks vastly expanded the emotional impact of the shootings. If the intention of the murderers was to create terror, then the wide reach of social media helped them in their goal. Videos of flashing emergency lights, transcripts and audios of panicked 911 calls, dispatch tapes and distraught twitter messages helped force all of Americans to experience the shootings as if they had occurred in their own homes. 

In addition, the lack of context to the information resulted in the creation of unwarranted anxiety across the nation. Coupled with the more recent NYC shootings, many individuals have become convinced that the nation is entering an era of greater violence. In fact, if one reads or listens to some of the commentaries regarding these tragedies, it will be hard to believe that the US is actually in the midst of its fifth year of declining violent crime. In this case, the wide publicity of these events has obscured the true, and somewhat more optimistic, state of affairs.

Less excusably, this tide of publicity helped the murderers achieve a notoriety that they did not deserve. In fact obtaining that notoriety may have been part of the intent of the theater and Sikh Temple shootings. At least for a while, their names became household names, and they could claim that they had held America in the grip of a fear they personally created.

If this demonstrates the tremendous power the new world of online and social media information technology wields, it also showcases the tremendous responsibility that private citizens and news organizations now hold, quite literally in the palm of their hands.  

In fact, the rise in online publicity may lead to an increased number of criminal acts in the future. Disaffected and mentally ill individuals or terrorists such as Norway's Anders Behring Breivik, may deliberately commit crimes with the intention of generating the greatest amount of publicity.

If this trend is to be curbed, a number of steps must be taken. One long overdue decision will be to implement educational policies to instruct students in the responsible use of social media. In a nation where some first graders have their own iPads, providing guidelines for social media usage will be a vital part of raising a generation of socially responsible adults.

Secondly, news organizations must resist the temptation to fill the entire 24 hour news cycle with baseless speculation and continual repeats of already stated information. In the case of the Aurora shooting, continually repeated 911 tapes and interviews with the distraught victims did more to frighten than they did to inform Americans. Reporters should focus on providing vital information to their viewers, and avoid helping criminals by unnecessarily inflaming the fears of their audience. 

Sadly, there will be other mass shootings. But a major part of defeating the intent of these future murderers will be to avoid giving them the power to terrorize the entire nation.

Such an action will not only defeat the goals of those who seek publicity through atrocity, but will hopefully discourage others from following in their footsteps.

The author is a freelance writer based in Corona, California. charlesgray109@gmail.com