NPR reporter blames internet for mass shooting

A US Army major shoots up Fort Hood, and NPR's Daniel Schorr blames... the internet.  It's a fascinating piece, a fine example of the fearsome internet theme.

It's hard to make out just how this explanation works, since Schorr only identifies a single factor: Hasan's email communications with one cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki. 

the army psychiatrist had frequented a mosque in Northern Virginia where Awlaki preached. More recently, a year ago, he sought to renew that contact by e-mail. The cleric has said that he did not reply to the first two or three messages, but then opened a relationship in which several more e-mails were exchanged over a year.

So it's unclear why the internet as a whole is to blame, rather than just email (Twitter is off the hook this time!) or that mosque.  It's also difficult to understand why Schorr blames the medium rather than the messenger, since the explanation is based entirely on the cleric somehow firming up Hasan's killing desires.

Worse yet, Schorr admits that he has no idea what was actually in the emails:

Texts of the messages have not been released, so it is difficult to know who said what to whom.

Content, in short, is bracketed out.  Only the form, or format, matter.  It's a form of the technology is not neutral school of thought, where our tools shape our use of them.  If you have a hammer, the world looks like a mass of nails.  How using email leads to serial homicide, Schorr doesn't exactly explain, but that's the conceptual underpinning.

Note, too, the way Schorr opposes the internet to the human - as if, through the internet, humans somehow cease to exist:

In the case of Hasan, judging from what has been disclosed, Internet contact with the like-minded seemed to replace human contact.

"human" here usually means "face to face" - as if humans don't use the internet.  (I always want to ask people who use this line if they consider letter-writing inhuman, or phones, or painting) 

There's also a hint of the echo chamber argument ("contact with the like-minded"), although that's nor pursued.

Besides weird argument and classic theory, Schorr also some finely tuned scary rhetoric:

[Maj. Nidal Hasan] had no accomplice — unless you count the Internet in which he communed, exchanging sinister thoughts with an extremist cleric...

does the Internet merit some of the responsibility for helping the violence prone to fester there in communion with the machine?

"sinister", "communed" and "communion," "fester" - tasty, almost purple prose. 

That last line, about violence festering, draws on the classic meme of the violent internet.  Or rather, the internet as hosting representations of violence, which somehow seep out into our precious bodily fluids offline lives.

One commentator adds that Schorr tries to mix in Obama's trip to China, vaguely linking Chinese internet censorship with the mysterious Hasan-Awlaki emails.  The connection is hard to make sense of, at best.  At worse, perhaps it's "an ironic counterpoint suggesting that censorship is, in fact, in the public’s best interest"?

(thanks to Jesse Walker, who closes with this fine line: "If email makes you shoot people, do microphones make you stupid?")

Comments

[Zack]

I normally enjoy Schorr's commentary, but I just about choked when I heard this the other morning. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to blame weather.com for the storm outside.

[Steven Kaye]

Well, he has a Twitter account:

http://twitter.com/DanielSchorr

I guess that's OK, since he limits his exposure and doesn't actually have conversations.