Seattle kids flood myspace searching for the missing, mourning the dead

How terribly tragic. Thanks for getting this to us so early after it happaned.Hope you can stay on top of this and let us know what happens.

Having recently moved back from the Pacific NW to Boston, I have a lot of friends up and down the coast out there. One friend was staggered that this story was already showing up in newspapers in Germany and Japan and all over the world, within hours of the event.

The world has changed. In the late 1800's, a psychologist in NYC found a high incidence of anxiety in his patients after the introduction of the telegraph made "wire services" available to the press. He noted that while a person might never hear of more than a few murders a year even in a large city, and not have any disaster for years, with the introduction of the telegraph, every person knew of a tragedy anywhere in the world in short order.

We think of this as a modern issue, but in fact it's been with us well over 100 years now.

Sadly, tragedy sells ads, so you will always hear more bad news than good news.

Still, I'm glad that the "wire" allowed these kids to connect after a terrible night.

One of the great miracles of the Internet--no longer is it the exclusive domain of the rich. Now, even commoners can be amateur journalists, or just conversationalists without having to go to a Town Hall or anything like that. Somehow, I think podcasters will eventually become like the radio programs of yesteryear, like Meet the Press or See it Now, only at a grassroots and more intimate level, unencumbered by the requirement of having to comply with inane censorship strictures or supression by local authorities. Which ties in to this Seattle tragedy, the kids now able to have the power to disseminate so much critical information, to be able to tell so many sides (including theirs) of the story, to give us sharper insight, through THEIR pictures & words and speech, into how this happened, why and the states of mind of all involved.

How awful...yet how gratifying that we live at a time where immediacy is a given, and like you said, online community is genuine community. It amazes me that in a mere hundred years we have expanded our ability to contact each other and build community, reaching out like never before, yet linking our lives and our news even more tightly. There are people now living who will never remember a time when news didn't travel the globe in a matter of minutes instead of days or weeks. We really are becoming a global village.

As you know, we've lived our whole life in Seattle. How tragic. Shava, I"m curious why you mentioned the MySpace part of this tragedgy. Was it that they were trying to help solve it.. or just that pathos in all of it?

Edward, it was because I'm part of several online communities, and often people dismiss them as fluff -- but when online community is an *extension* of real life communities, it's incredibly powerful stuff.

Here is an example of people connecting online, as real community, over a common experience. People dismiss communities like myspace as fluffy, but they are part of a new way of building culture and community.

It's not because they were trying to solve it, or the pathos, but because they are there and real. The internet isn't a toy anymore, and as Enoch said, it belongs to more and more people regardless of location or means, every year.

Not pop. Culture.