In late August of this year, there was a shooting in Virginia. Timing his spree to perfection, a disturbed man interrupted a routine morning broadcast on Roanoke’s WDBJ7 television station and shot dead the reporter and her cameraman. News of the killing spread like wildfire across America: first around social media, then onto cable news, and finally into the reportage and opinion sections of the nation’s newspapers. The following day, the headlines read predictably: “horror,” “tragedy,” “slaying.”
The murders were all of these things. But there was something a touch different about this abomination — something horribly, ineffably, inescapably modern. The United States has suffered through some gruesome public executions in its past — this, after all, is the nation that saw Lee Harvey Oswald killed live on NBC and that watched in abject disbelief as a series of airplanes slammed into American targets. But before August 26, consumers had never been able to bypass their television sets and access directly the mind of a maniac. What we have seen abroad from ISIS and their despicable kin has now come here, too. America has entered the age of the social-media murder. Reality TV will never be the same again.
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