Gordon’s delivery and straight-to-camera gaze had all the hallmarks of a social media influencer with the sound off, he could be pitching a product. Yet the elements that made the video so shareable were the same ones that made it depressing. Gordon had my full attention for his two-minute video, no easy feat in the sea of waving hands on Twitter. “Why is it that the United States Marine Corps, the finest fighting force on the planet, is more restrictive on who and where firearms can be stored and possessed than the average 18-year-old in the state of Texas?” He slaps his arm to his side. You cannot store a personal weapon in Marine barracks, he says it must be registered and kept elsewhere. His cadence builds to Aaron Sorkin levels of indignation as he continues. The horror of the event was obvious, and yet that obviousness did not alleviate the need to see the horror articulated - to engage with what the journalist Ryan Broderick, who monitors viral media and web culture, calls a kind of “emotional aggregation,” in which passionate video pleas rise into an “emotional feedback loop.” His cadence builds to Aaron Sorkin levels of indignation as he continues. News reports were filled with awful details, like the parents heard screaming as officials told them their children were dead. As the internet served me reactions - from celebrities, from CNN anchors, ripped from TikTok - I found myself drawn to them and repelled by them in equal measure. coach Steve Kerr, whose father was shot to death at his university, pounding a table at a news conference (“When are we going to do something?”) Jimmy Kimmel solemnly addressing the camera with no audience (“You can tell things are out of whack when the coach of the Golden State Warriors shows more leadership and passion than almost every Republican in Congress”). Soon clips would emerge from the Connecticut senator Chris Murphy, who represented the House district where the Sandy Hook massacre happened (“What are we doing?” he pleaded to a seemingly empty Senate) the N.B.A. There are also the reactions to the news - videos whose popularity rests less on their ability to inform or persuade than on their capacity to reflect raw emotion. Within a day, you would see the stomach-churning clips of survivors, bystanders, parents, followed by the heartbreaking photos and details of victims - which, for the town of Uvalde, meant reading obituaries of fourth graders, where in place of adult achievements stood details like: “ Her favorite color was sage green.”īut it’s not just the news that goes viral. First, the errant clips from people near the scene then the early, erroneous news stories then the timeline filling in, hour by hour, as national media jostled with local outlets for information. From the moment reports of a shooter in a Texas elementary school hit social media, you knew to expect certain beats.
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