It's eerie that this tragedy is taking place in Blacksburg, VA. This small city, which is dominated by Virginia Tech, was one of the first communities in the country to be totally wired. There's even a village url that is announced on a large sign on the highway coming into town; the kind of sign that usually reads "home of Glenn Campbell." The students are using their own blackboard at "Planet Blacksburg" to share their horror and grief; the BBC reported one student saying that he "wouldn't have known what to do without the Internet."
Now a former student who works at AOL is sharing his former classmate's, Cho Seung's, dark and violent plays, which were digitized at the time the classmate, Ian MacFarlane, read them in school. (Cho Seung is now identified as the shooter who killed 33 people yesterday on the campus in a two-hour rampage.)
So in media 2.0 world, the loner, Cho Seung, gets instant global distribution for his digital works. But students can find solace from friends - and even from perfect strangers - in real time. As usual, yin and yang, no?