Sandy Hook & Social Media

As a human being, I have no words for what happened on friday. Words have proved amazingly inadequate in the past four days.

All I can say is that the shooting in Connecticut left me with a sense of horror and loss I haven't felt since 9/11. I have no answers and I won't try.

What's been unavoidable and intriguing to me is noting the obvious differences in our society between 2001 and now.

I found out about Sandy Hook on facebook. After asking around, I know a number of people who did too. My job has grown to include social media promotion in the past three months and its created in me a deeper awareness of the machine. Even in my personal browsing and sharing I can't help but analyze what gets a reaction, what makes people tick, what "motive" exists behind each photo, comment or link.

For a brief moment on friday morning, there was a raw, poignant pause in which shock and devastation overwhelmed my newsfeed.

There was unity spanning a network of about 600 totally un-related people whose only common denominator is me.

It didn't last long. Not half an hour later, I watched "told-ya-so" gun control comments emerge from my so-termed "left-leaning" friends, and self-righteous abortion comparisons pop up from the right.

My question is this. Are we, in 2012, so de-sensitized to violence, death and tragedy that we can only fully enter into it and experience it for a brief moment before the shock subsides and we reconcile it with what we already know to be true?

Or: Is our focus turned so irrevocably inward that we filter every happening through the lens of ourselves, and how it supports or harms our personal agendas.  Can we truly experience anything for what it is anymore? Or has the need to feed our personal brand overwhelmed authentic reactions like  joy or grief.

Its a question that's been gnawing at me for a while. I made it through the entire bloodbath that was the 2012 election season without uttering so much as a syllable. But I couldn't let this pass without commenting.

And now. Excuse me, while I post this link to facebook....