This is what happens in the Age of Facebook.
Early reports, citing Connecticut law enforcement sources, identified the shooter as a twentysomething from Newtown named Ryan Lanza. A Facebook profile fitting that description was easily accessible, and social media users—from professional reporters to online onlookers—immediately assumed they had discovered the Facebook profile of the gunman who had perpetrated the mass shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School. News outlets including BuzzFeed, Mediaite, Gawker, and Fox News speculated that the account belonged to the shooter. Journalists from Slate, Huffington Post, CNN, and other news organizations tweeted links to the Facebook profile.
But it was the wrong guy. Press reports are now identifying the shooter as Adam Lanza. Ryan Lanza, identified as Adam’s brother, has reportedly been questioned by police. According to the Associated Press, “a law enforcement official mistakenly transposed the brothers’ first names.” The result was that, for a few brief hours in the middle of the day, based on press speculation about the suspect’s identity, social media users brought out the digital equivalent of pitchforks and torches, vilifying the alleged shooter’s brother and haranguing Ryan Lanzas all across the intertubes.
Political cartoonist Matt Bors, who was Facebook friends with Ryan Lanza but didn’t actually know him personally, was inundated with Facebook messages and friend requests as a result. “I was getting messages from people saying, why are you friends with a monster?” Bors says.

There’s a jump, skip, and thump to the front with the “latest” details in these news items.  We shouldn’t jump, skip, and jump to the front.  Better to have details come in than not… there are a lot of people with the same name out there.  We gain nothing from such rampant morbid curiosity.

In the case of the Connecticut shooting incident… the thing that gets me… the mom was a gun enthusiast.  “Survivalist“.  Okay, not my hobby and a recent skipping through a Gun magazine brought to my mind the “that’s a lot of creepy hostility”… The 20 year old shooter was an ill-functioning Asperger case — (important to qualify with “ill functioning”) and the “lacked nonverbal communication skills, demonstrated limited empathy with their peers, and were physically clumsy” – and not able to fail pain (had to be careful of that when he was playing sports).  My thought here is that the mother, somewhere in the last 20 years with this person in custody, ought have gone to a different hobby.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 17th, 2012 at 10:48 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.