Columbine all over again...

So I'm pretty sure that you have all heard by now about Virginia Tech. I first saw it around 1:30 when I flipping through the channels. In my opinion it's Columbine all over again, just at a university this time instead of a high school. I will first go off and say that my heart goes out to all of the families that lost a love one there today. I don't know if they have mentioned anything about the gunman yet, but I plan keeping tabs on the news. Well if your about to ask what this has to do with new media, I'm about to tell you. There are two things that I saw that prompted me to write this post when I was watching the news channels. The first was an uncut piece of video that one of the students took during the event. The footage wasn't all that great and was blurry which made me guess that it was shot using his cell phone. Anyway, it was about 30 seconds and you can hear the gun shots up until you hear a cop telling him and others to get out of the area. I really figured that it would be all over youtube now, but before writing this post, I went ahead and did a search for it, and weirdly enough, no one has posted it yet. This does bring me to the second thing. When watching the new-cast on MSNBC, I was reading the text bars at the bottom of the screen, and saw one that said that students were all ready on Myspace and other networks discussing the incident. I was already amazed at how fast information can be transmitted due to media devices such as cell phones how soon it's available thanks to site like Myspace and youtube, but with this situation, I think we are going to find out so much more. I mean when Columbine happened, we didn't have all of this, but now, forget the press. We are going to be able to get the real information almost first hand. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that this whole thing happening was a good thing, but were as in the past we would only get half the truth or what we thought was the truth, with everything that society has at it's disposal, we are going to get the what actually happened straight from the people that had to live through it. I don't know whether to say if the might be good or bad in the long run, but it will defiantly change things for the future.