Seventy-two hours after Virginia Tech's bloggers and camera-phone photographers scooped the newspapers and networks, the catastrophe hasn't finished breaking new media ground. Geeks love nothing more than a puzzle, so it's no surprise that the world's bloggers have been turning their attention to the killer Cho Seung-hui, his identity and motives.
They are finding an unprecedented quantity of online evidence and information. It includes examples of his college class work, the very search warrant issued to gain access to his home (see over), a detention order made on mental health grounds, and now a growing list of video clips, photos and text from Cho Seung-hui's macabre mailout to NBC.
Yesterday's citizen journalists are today's amateur detectives, taking part in a giant online 'crowd-sourced' investigation. |
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Bloggers are piecing together their own profile of the Virginia Tech murderer, says linton chiswick |
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At first, there appeared to be a lack of written material by Cho Seung-hui; in an age of online chatter, this alone seemed to mark the killer out. Silent in class, anti-social out of class, he wasn't the type to blog or leave clues scattered across the social web. (Among the internet generation, an absence of online footprints is almost proof of non-existence.)
But one of Cho Seung-hui's former classmates - now working for AOL - had kept two short plays, written by the killer and submitted in an English class for peer review. Soon, they were online.
They would have been comical in their slapstick violence and awful dialogue if we didn't all know the ending. In this context, they were compelling - an embarrassment of riches for online sleuths and
amateur psychiatrists.
One, entitled Richard McBeef, is 
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