my 2 cents

I get sucked into wall to wall media coverage, whatever it is. So for the past few days I have learned a lot of details about the Virginia Tech shootings. And since I teach Intro to Mass Comm right now I have discussed both coverage and the event itself with students.

My students are scared. They are young, and away from home. And all the words of the media stories are familiar to them: dorms, classrooms, halls, boyfriends, girlfriends, plans for the future.

It's hard for me to accept the notion that there should be pure evil in people. I just don't think that is true. I think people are basically good, but that bad things can happen to them to make them angry and vindictive. Obviously we don't know anything about this kid's family background, or what really happened to him earlier in his life. And we don't know anything about his mental health status either. Clearly, it seems, he was very ill.

People have been making connections between the images he created of himself (in the video footage he sent to NBC) and images created in some real movies. Specifically one violent Korean film, but there are others too.

It seems to me, and this is what I teach in class, that today all of us live in a reality created in part by what we learn through mass media. Through all sorts of fiction we think we 'know' people and settings we have never seen in real life. We talk about places and situations, we speculate and draw conclusions, as if the events happened to us and people we know.

We move in and out of these layers of real and imagined without reflecting. But most of us understand the difference between fantasy and real life.

It gets dangerous whenever someone takes their fantasy public. When people act for private reasons in a public setting, or act on private interpretations of the world where others are involved. To some degree I think that's true for all of us; when we make others pay for how we feel. Or impose our world view on others.