The Internet and the end of the world (as we knew it)

It’s no secret that the world didn’t end Friday, but what’s less easily discerned is that the world we used to know DID end, not on Friday, but relatively recently — let’s say sometime in the last decade.

I’m talking about the world of important and powerful people making decisions for the rest of us without our knowledge or input. The key words in that last sentence are knowledge and power, and they point the way to the cataclysmic upheaval known as the Internet.

If knowledge is power, then the world saw a revolution in the last decade which was indeed the end of the world as we know it — or, more accurately, knew it. Indeed, if the Mayan shamans had been able to comprehend a world where everyone everywhere had the capacity to know virtually everything (and to post it to Facebook!) they would probably have freaked out — calendar or no calendar!

We’ve seen evidence of the ability of social media to give power to the people in some big ways in the past few years — most notably in the so-called Arab Spring, where several corrupt Mideast regimes were toppled because of the ability of the people to bypass traditional information sources and communicate directly with each other about their discontentment and their aspirations, as well as how to organize a rebellion.

The Chinese government lives in terror that eventually the giant red dragon of communism will be defeated by a tiny blue bird — the seemingly innocuous symbol of Twitter. If the students of Tiananmen Square had been armed with smartphones in 1989, rather than flowers, they almost certainly would have been able to incite a nationwide rebellion that very possibly could have led to the toppling of the government.

Of course, on a smaller scale, Twitter and Facebook have influenced thousands of news stories over the past few years. Most famously, perhaps, Anthony Weiner was forced to resign his congressional seat when it was discovered that he was using his Twitter account to send sexually explicit photos and messages to his online paramours while telling his new bride (and his constituents!) that he was at the office working late.

Not all the ramifications are clear yet of how social media can change the nature of politics, governance, reporting, business and personal relationships, but change they inevitably will.

We had a small taste of that here at the Daily Inter Lake last week when we got caught up in the middle of a rumor that had gone viral on Facebook and other social media that there would be a shooting at a local school on Dec. 21, which NOT coincidentally (as it turned out) was also the date when the Mayan calendar supposedly predicted a doomsday.

We first heard about the rumor on Saturday, Dec. 15, and because we couldn’t get ahold of any official who could discuss the matter with us, we held it for further investigation the following day. On Sunday, however, the weekend police reporter WAS able to confirm with police that they knew about the bogus threat, which was being widely circulated among students in School District 5, and wound up being reported to police from as far away as San Diego.

Mind you, this was all before the Inter Lake reported one word. The story had a life of its own —  not because of anything we did, but because of the nature of the world we live in now. The reporter and editor working that Sunday night decided to use the rumor as the lead item in our daily Law Enforcement Roundup, with the headline “Rumors predict local shooting.”

Coming, as it did, just a few days after the school shootings in Newtown, Conn., the story gave me and a lot of other people who opened the paper on Monday morning a start! And though the tiny one-paragraph story confirmed that police and school officials knew about the rumors, and had an idea who started them, there was still a question in my mind whether reporting on it was a good idea or not. We certainly didn’t want to encourage a panic.

I talked to one reader who considered the report to be irresponsible, and for a time I agreed with her, but the more I learned, the less certain I was. We even heard from one teacher at a local high school who thanked us for running the story to inform the community.

Then, as our reporter made more calls throughout the day, we discovered that school officials had been busy all weekend fielding calls and emails from concerned parents who had heard about the supposed threat from their children and wanted to know just what the school district was doing about it. Moreover, it turned out that the rumor stemmed from a student’s comment that was made before the Newtown massacre had occurred, and was really meant to be a sick joke about doing something crazy and irresponsible before the end of the world arrived on Dec. 21. It was, in other words, teen-age angst, but probably not the deadly kind.

Suddenly, the idea of covering up the story seemed like exactly the wrong approach. I have two children in the district, including one in high school, and I certainly would want to know about any threats that might affect them, just as I would want to know how the school district was handling the incident. Moreover, a large number of students already knew about the situation from text messages, Facebook and Twitter. It was, for the most part, just the parents who were in the dark.

Ultimately, I decided the Inter Lake could not have ignored such a story. Adults with kids in school certainly have a right to be informed about threats which their children are talking about and disseminating in messages to each other. And if hundreds or even thousands of parents and students already knew about the threats, then the rest of the community also had to be included.

By the middle of the week, we were hearing about similar rumors that were circulating in other schools in Montana. Students were suspended in Billings for virtually identical threats, and schools in Butte were experiencing stepped-up police patrols.

Our Monday report was based on the limited information which our reporter was able to get on Sunday, after already holding the story for one day, but whether or not the story had been in Monday’s paper, it definitely would have been in Tuesday’s paper. And either way, we were late with the story compared to the little blue bird who can fly around the world in less than a second.

Yep, the world is a changed place, and we’re all just trying to learn how to keep up with 21st-century information technology that not only would have scared the ancient Mayans, but kind of scares me, too!