When Society and Social Media Go Bang Bang

When gunfire erupted at one of Canada’s most popular shopping malls, the social networks were a flurry of activity, showing the power and the danger of social media.

Last Saturday evening around the dinner hour, one person was killed and seven others seriously injured, after being shot in the Urban Eatery food court at Toronto’s Eaton Centre. The Toronto Eaton Centre is one of the busiest shopping malls in Canada’s largest city.

People were tweeting pictures of the chaos as a stampede of people rushed up the escalators to escape. Others were uploading videos to YouTube, of scared shoppers huddled under tables trying to avoid being shot. 

Wait a sec – don’t you have to stick your arm up to shoot those videos on your Smartphone? How can you avoid being trampled in a crowd if you are busy typing out a tweet?

The immediacy of social media allows us to share what is happening right now. But that immediacy also can put us in danger.

Many local and regional governments have created laws against texting and driving – and rightly so. Studies show that distractions like texting and talking on your mobile device are just as likely to cause a deadly crash as drinking and driving.

But isn’t tweeting while being shot at an obviously dangerous—if not a foolish -- thing to do?

If I was being shot at, the last thing I would think of would be to pause, whip out my iPhone, and start shooting video. My first instinct would be to duck and run for cover.

We know that attention spans have dramatically become all the shorter in our modern age of 140 character tweets – but has common sense also become even less common?

The images and videos uploaded to the social networks began to “trend” as many started watching and re-posting the action as it unfolded. Major news networks here in Canada and around the world showed some of these videos and images too, giving instant fame to those who uploaded the content.

And hey – admit it – you want to have at least one thing you post on the social networks become so popular that it goes “viral” – right?

 

Though, if you get killed in the process of uploading that tweet, YouTube video, or “pic” to the other social networks, you may never know your post went viral because you’d be dead.

I admit I was glued to my seat, watching these images and videos appear live from the scene – it made for good TV.

However, I was watching all of this from the safety of my couch at home. 

Maybe I scare easily. Or maybe I just have enough common sense not to sacrifice my life for the chance to have ten-seconds of video shown on the nightly news?