Web 2.0 and the Virginia Tech massacre

Face­book and other social net­work­ing sites are get­ting more atten­tion as the media exam­ines how Vir­ginia Tech imple­mented its cri­sis com­mu­ni­ca­tion plan yesterday.

The New York Times inter­viewed to sev­eral peo­ple who used blogs, pro­files and other tools to get infor­ma­tion about friends and fam­ily members.

There are now over 500 memo­r­ial groups listed on Face­book, includ­ing an HPU group. Boing­Bo­ing noted that at least one TV news pro­gram (Date­line NBC) set up a Face­book group to find mem­bers who knew Seung Hui-Cho. CNN inter­viewed two of Cho’s for­mer room­mates today.

Vir­gina Tech has can­celed classes for the remain­der of the week, and Nor­ris Hall has been closed for the rest of the aca­d­e­mic year. The entire build­ing is a crime scene. It really should be torn down and replaced with a memorial.

One last update: it now appears that 5 fac­ulty mem­bers and 25 stu­dents were killed in Nor­ris Hall. I neglected to men­tion in my last post Joce­lyne Couture-Nowak, a Cana­dian instruc­tor who taught French, and Christo­pher James Bishop, who was teach­ing an intro­duc­tory Ger­man class when he was killed at his podium.

Chris Bishop was an Atlanta Braves fan who earned two degrees at the Uni­ver­sity of Geor­gia, where I earned my Ph.D. in strate­gic management.

I’m blog­ging about this sit­u­a­tion because it hits too close to home. I earned my under­grad­u­ate degree at the Col­lege of William and Mary, which is located across the state in Williams­burg. I’ve met many peo­ple who stud­ied or taught in Blacks­burg, and my heart is heavy as I think about what hap­pened there yes­ter­day. There are days when it’s hard for me to walk down Fort Street Mall and feel safe. I can only hope some good comes out of all this suffering.

Tagged as: network, security, social, student, university, USA