Dialectic... Take 2

This is very incomplete and, really, the most important bits are still unwritten, but I'd love your feedback. Specifically, I'd like to know where you might want to hear more. Is the event itself clear? My goal is to begin the dialectic with dialogue, yes, but also to establish the context for a discussion on how to respond to social media related panic. I may even extend some of that conversation to this panic in school-aged children, like those affected in this example. Also, if you have read anything about social media benefitting in disaster response or enacting panic, I'd love to hear your two cents. I will be diving into a new book by Liza Potts this weekend to see if she can shed some light and help me generate some ideas for the meatiest part of my dialectic. Thanks!

I hope this is okay, but I wanted to do a somewhat cinematic dialectic that spans more than one day because of the way this specific event played out.

Wednesday September 3, 2014

Student/child: I can’t go to school tomorrow. Something bad is going to happen.

Parent: What? Why do you say that?

Student/child: I saw it on Instagram. Those guys, the ones who call themselves The Merry Men, tagged our campus. It was all over Instagram.

Parent: The Merry Men? Aren’t those the people who tagged the Catholic Church a month ago with antiestablishment propaganda? They tagged the school?

Student/child: Yeah, two nights ago – on Tuesday. They were bragging all over Instagram. Now everybody is freaking out on Twitter because somebody is saying they are going to shoot up the school tomorrow!

Parent: Okay. There is absolutely no way that I am letting you go to school tomorrow. With all of the school shootings over the last few years, we are not risking this for one day of class. Plus, I would be a nervous wreck all day. I wonder how the school supervisors are going to handle this?

Thursday September 4, 2014

Principal: After last night, I didn’t think this week could get any worse. First, our campus was tagged by The Merry Men. Then, there was tremendous social media chatter about a shooting today. This isn’t the sort of thing I take lightly, especially not with the rising wave of school shootings. Bullard High students must remain safe, but at what cost? We cannot live in fear. We cannot forgo education in light of panic. That is why we went on high alert. Although I don’t believe that guns are the solution to our problems, these guns held by highly trained officers of the law might prevent these insane antiestablishment Merry Men from instilling more fear, harm, and possibly fatalities here on our campus. And if guns in the right hands on the right days will prevent that, then I am an advocate for guns. Bombs are a different story.

Late this morning, around 11:00 am, I felt hollow after reading an email stating there was a bomb on my campus. A bomb. On my campus. The panic generated by last night’s Instagram threat was enough to cause too many students to avoid school today, and who can blame them? Now, I have no choice but to close the campus early even though we have swept the campus and found that both threats have been hollow. The panic was too widespread. Students didn’t take it seriously enough and parents overreacted. It seems that the days before social media prevailed were simpler times, but there is no going back. So how can we mitigate or even circumnavigate this kind of event in future?

** I know the remainder of this is the really important part, but I haven’t quite gotten there yet. With Dr. Rice’s help, I just got the general structure down. From here, I will have the principal and a scholar debate the different options for handling this kind of social media event in future.