‘The umbrella guy: Were these images a cause, or an effect, of the panic?
We were having a family birthday party for one of my kids Sunday night when I got a call from my brother in Greenville. He called to make sure that we knew we shouldn’t venture near the USC campus. There was apparently an “active shooter” situation, and the campus was locked down.
I saw that one person at our party seemed to be about to leave, so I asked my brother to hold on a moment, and I made an immediate announcement to the entire household about the news, suggesting that no one head in that direction. I was very much in a mode that was a sort of cross between “Now hear this!” and “General Quarters!”
But everyone already knew. My wife informed me that everyone had been talking about it at the table. I had missed it competely, which is a frequent occurrence with the state of my hearing.
Anyway, by that time the folks in charge on campus were already stepping down the alert, and within minutes they had given the “all clear.” Not because the “shooter” had been arrested or otherwise eliminated, but because he hadn’t existed.
There were some reported minor injuries, however — people who got hurt in the stampede of students trying to evacuate the area.
He was a creation of the remarkable new technology that we enjoy in the 21st century. No, not AI. You didn’t need that to produce this panic.
I’m talking about such quaint things as Al Gore’s Internet, smartphones with ever-improving cameras, social media, and the resulting ability of practically everyone on the planet to pass information to everyone else on the planet, whether it’s true or not.
Which is all stuff I have enjoyed greatly over the last couple of decades. But I’ve also pointed out how this combination of items is destroying our country, and other countries devoted to liberal democracy. But enough politics; back to the subject.
Of course, this causes people to scoff at the old newspaper guy wishing for the good ole days. Well, let me tell you about the good old days. Over the last day, I was thinking about how this would have unfolded, say, 25 years ago.
Basically, it would not have unfolded. It wouldn’t have happened. Of course, it didn’t happen, but something else did happen — a campus full of thousands of kids, not to mention their folks back home, were scared out of their wits. And some of them got hurt (but not seriously, apparently) in the rush to the exits.
Of course, I thought of this first from the perspective of a newspaperman. Back when such things as daily newspapers existed and thrived, news happened all through the 24 hours, but it only got published once. Back then, when the word of possible shootings went out, reporters would have rushed to the campus, the way they did Sunday night, and reported what they found. And for an hour or so, the whole news structure would be in high gear to meet the challenge. But then, about an hour later, everyone would know it was a load of nothing, and calm down. There might be a story about how everyone got excited and worried for a time, but there would at no time be a story delivered to actual readers crying out about havoc on the campus.
But I’m not fully imagining what would have happened. The thing is, there wouldn’t have even have been a story about the big scare. Why? Because there would have been no scare, for a number of reasons.
First, the images of a harmless-looking guy ambling along carrying an umbrella would not have existed. If you’re young — very young — it might be hard to imagine that. But you see, a mere quarter-century ago, people didn’t photograph everything they saw around them. I was one of the few people who might have done such a thing, because starting in my own college days, I got into 35mm photography in a big way. But I didn’t shoot a tenth of the images I now shoot every day, for the simple reason that film — and the chemicals I needed to develop it and make prints from it — cost money. It also cost a lot of time. Even if you were one of those civilians who dropped off their rolls at the drugstore, it still cost you some time. And unless you went to one of those one-hour places, you wouldn’t be seeing your prints for some days.
But let’s suppose that, being the camera geek I was, I did shoot such images, and somehow made the finished image appear instantly (remember that not even Polaroids were instantaneous, and the quality was awful). And suppose I also had the poor judgment to decide I wanted urgently to share this image, and my wild imaginings, with the world. How would I have done that — physically, technically? And how many people would I have reached? I assure you I had a much greater chance than most of you to get my picture into print, but I’d have to wait some hours before the presses rolled. And after they rolled, there’d be a further wait of hours (usually) before readers beheld it.
And by that time, we would have known for some hours that the pictures showed nothing that needed to be shared with anybody. They would be worthless, and of no interest.
There is value in having time to think, time to assess, time to recognize the truth before something is shouted to the world.
But we’ve lost that precious resource, and I don’t see any way of getting it back again. So in light of the existence of these new technologies, how on Earth are we going to stop driving each other stark, raving mad?
[Editor’s note: After I wrote the above, reporting on this incident has shifted more in the direction of a deliberate hoax, part of a pattern across the country, with less emphasis on innocent mistake. That significantly reduces the role that social media played, but it doesn’t eliminated it, because it doesn’t change the dynamics of the way current technology cause panic to metastasize, far ahead of the ability of reasonable investigation to catch up. (Although authorities did an excellent job of sorting it out as quickly as possible.) Without the technology, there might have been a panic on campus, but not across the country, as occurred in this case. This explanation raises other questions — if the cause of the panic was a couple of false phone calls, what role did the photos of the guy with the umbrella play? Was that just already-panicked students shooting pics of everything they saw and sending them out? I don’t know. In any case, they played a significant role in the widespread stress, based on what I was hearing from various folks following the incident.]
