Earlier I was reading through the Twitter account of the now apprehended suspect and what is most striking is just how normal he is. Every one of his tweets could have been attributed to a completely normal teenager, he couldn't be more generic. It's strange how Twitter offers an insight into his life... but really it doesn't show anything. When someone blew people up in the 90s the news would report they're crazy, we'd all accept it and move on but now with platforms like Twitter we can see how this could be any one of us, maybe we're all one shitty situation away from doing terrible things. Unnerving.
Some of the people I regularly follow on Twitter were literally in disbelief over hearing this about someone they thought they knew - "please take him alive" they pleaded.
It was awful to see someone be so wrong about a person, as it became more and more certain that he was indeed one of the people involved in the bombing.
Well, not all of them... I remember there was one native kid who made the news a few years back that had massively telegraphed his plans. He'd made Flash animations of murder-suicide killing sprees and hung around on neo-Nazi forums before he went off.
I'm not sure I get what you're saying about traditional media. It's a well-accepted trope about mass murderers and serial killers that whenever their neighbors and family interviewed them it would be said that they we're quiet and kept to themselves.
The only insight we used to get into "bad people" was second hand, what people had seen and the things they had done. Now we get to see it all first hand. He has over 1,000 tweets from the last 18 months, Tweets that offer an insight into what he enjoyed, what he did, how he felt... we get to see him as a human. How many people saw Ted Bundy as a human? Maybe I'm overstating the value of his Tweets.
