CLEVELAND (OHIO) - A MULTIMEDIA rant on the mass murder at Virginia Tech University in the United States shocked the world last week.
Its frightening photos and profane video clips of gunman Cho Seung Hui - who paused, even as he was killing 32 fellow students and teachers, to send the package to a TV station - gave a chilling look into a psychotic mind.
It was one that most people will never forget, and many would rather have not seen at all. Yet today's technology made it almost impossible for anyone to avoid.
Students, and the university itself, used e-mail messages to send alerts that a lunatic was loose on campus. Internet blogs and chatrooms buzzed with news, rumours - and copycat threats - even as the shots were still echoing through Norris Hall.
One student recorded the horrific sounds of the shooting, screams and sights of pandemonium on a cellphone - a clip broadcast again and again on TV stations, the Internet, other cellphones and Blackberrys the world over.
And as the killings ended and the realisation that promising young lives had been cut short started to sink in, mourners who did not even know any of the victims uploaded video memorials to them on YouTube and other websites.
Not only did Cho's shooting spree make history in its scope, as the biggest shooting spree in recent American history, it will also go down as a case study of how the rise and spread of technology has enabled the media, for better or worse, to invade almost every aspect of almost everyone's life.
Ironically, it all centred on a young South Korean-born man who, according to fellow students, teachers, counsellors and even his own family, was incapable of communicating with others personally. Some reports even suggested he was diagnosed as autistic as a child in Seoul.
'He never spoke at all during the nine months he lived with us,' said Karan Grewal, a student whose room is next to Cho's at 2121 Harper Hall in Virginia Tech.
Grewal crossed paths in the hall with a typically silent Cho at 5am on the very day of the shootings.
In fact, he told CNN in an interview aired on Friday that the white-painted cinder blocks seen in the background of many photos and videos of the 'multimedia' rant - the package NBC received by overnight mail from Cho - looked like those in their dormitory.
He speculated that the disturbed student made the videos right there while others were in class.
Cho began his killing spree at 7.15am on Monday, apparently murdering his first two victims in a nearby dormitory, West Ambler Johnston Hall.
Technology may have even made it quick and easy for him to record more rambling diatribes - and still have time to package and mail them - before carrying out the bloodbath at Norris Hall a little more than two hours later.
In at least one clip, Cho spoke as if he had already murdered some victims, possibly the first two in the dorm: 'I didn't have to do it. I could have left. I could have fled.'
Technology and the media might have been used to save lives too but by the time officials turned to that option, it was too late.
The first e-mail alert about the incident at West Ambler Johnston did not pop up on the computers, cellphones and Blackberrys of the Virginia Tech community until 9.26am.
By then all of the students and teachers whom Cho was about to murder in Norris Hall had started their classes there, oblivious to that alert.
In fact, rumours had spread through campus e-mail linking the dorm shootings to a lover's tiff and may have sent police off in the wrong direction initially and fed the university's thinking that no one else was in danger.
It was not until 9.50am, five minutes after the first 911 caller reported that the shooting had started at Norris Hall, that a stronger warning was sent through e-mail.
'Please stay put. Stay in buildings until further notice. Stay away from all windows,' it said.
The next e-mail sent by the university - at 10.17am - finally said that all classes had been cancelled.
The most chilling bit of multimedia on view in the Virginia Tech tragedy - up until Cho's harangue was discovered in the mail - was the sound of gunshot after gunshot, then an anguished scream, captured by graduate student Jamal Albarghouti as he was passing the hall - all on his cellphone.
CNN and other stations broadcast that clip over and over worldwide.
Two Swedish students also filmed shooting victims being carried from the building with a mini-digital videocamera and camcorder.
Backlash against the 24-7 coverage of the massacre came next. It began after NBC opened its national Nightly News show on Wednesday with a clip from Cho's multimedia package of 28 videos, 43 photos and a rambling 23-page rant that surfaced in its mail on Wednesday.
In it, the obviously deranged Cho portrayed himself as a veritable martyr for the poor and oppressed, and blamed everyone but himself for the massacre.
Almost immediately, angry calls and e-mail messages - including those from experts - bombarded local and national TV stations, websites and blogs. Many said that the airing of the footage had made the media complicit in the massacre.
Mr Steve Capus, the president of NBC News, strongly defended the network's decision to broadcast the material.
'The news-value question is long gone,' he said. 'Every journalist is united on this. You can tell by their actions.'
That was not quite true. Matt Lauer, the host of the station's popular daily Today show, expressed reservations.
'Let's be honest,' he said on the show on Thursday morning. 'There are some big differences of opinion right within this news division whether we should be airing this stuff at all, whether we're taking the right course of action.'
The biggest fear, according to a popular TV talk show host known as Dr Phil, was that the media had made Cho an international celebrity and that would certainly spark other troubled people to try emulating his bloody road to infamy.
In the hours after the extent of that carnage at Virginia Tech became known, psychiatrist Phil McGraw's prediction came true.
Television alerts lit up TV screens across the US and parents and students were warned by cellphone as schools and other buildings received threats by phone and e-mail of more bloodshed.
As a result, the high school in Berea right here in the Cleveland area closed on Friday after a person posted a warning on MySpace.com that he would commit an atrocity worse than that in Virginia Tech.
Schools in California and Colorado - which paid tribute to the victims of the Columbine High School massacre which happened eight years ago on Friday - and elsewhere were also locked down after receiving threats.
On Friday afternoon, a gunman killed a hostage and himself after holing up in a building at Johnson Space Centre in Houston.
Messages and blogs also began threatening South Koreans and other Asians. A Taiwanese man who collects guns and has an Internet blog was mistaken for the gunman. He found it clogged with spam, much of it hate mail.
By Friday, the media had reined itself in. Fox News stopped airing clips of Cho entirely. NBC announced that it would limit its use of the images across NBC News, including MSNBC.
In the end though, what has become increasingly evident is that a disturbingly dark side to technology went on display last week - that it offered the English major an easy way out of his problems, and his lonely life.
All he did was push the buttons of digital cameras and computer keyboards, well aware he would be able to rail at the world on international television, after pulling the triggers of guns instead of reaching out to people who might have been able to help him help himself, and prevented his crime.
The father of a 19-year-old victim, Mary Kay Read - whose mother is Korean, summed up the feelings of viewers and victims alike when they saw Cho's vicious visage take precedence over the smiling faces of their loved ones that he had slaughtered.
'For the love of God and our children, please stop broadcasting those images and those words,' said Mr Peter Reed. 'It's a second assault on our children.'
This article was published in The Straits Times on April 21, 2007.
