Nightmare 2.0.

By James Poniewozik

The multimedia manifesto that Cho Seung-Hui shipped to NBC News, in between rounds of killing, included the digital picture shown above of the Virginia Tech murderer brandishing two pistols. A message about the times is implicit: that the technology for recording horror has advanced, even if the technology for inflicting it has not. The rambling rationalizations, the pictures of hollow-point bullets--Cho's final testament was like a deranged MySpace parody.

From the beginning, the tragedy fit a generation used to living in public through YouTube and social-networking sites. Now members of that generation were killing, dying and mourning in public. When graduate student Jamal Albarghouti saw police drawing guns near Norris Hall, he took out his camera phone and--in the signal impulse of the information-sharing age--ran toward the scene.

Through the brief, shaky video, which Albarghouti uploaded to CNN.com millions of TV and Web viewers crouched beside him as he hit the pavement and heard the metered, methodical gunshots. On the V.T. campus, students texted and IMed while trapped in classrooms; they posted news on Facebook; at Aol.com they shared Cho's unsettling creative-writing assignments.

Yet technology also conferred a shroud of privacy amid the spectacle. Fox News anchor Shepard Smith noted seeing students silently text-messaging before the Tuesday memorial service. "It feels like there is an undercurrent of information being passed that doesn't reach to our level but is remaining within the Virginia Tech family," he said.

The V.T. shootings marked the latest step in a long trend of you-witness journalism. The London 7/7 bombings were caught on camera phone; cell-phone calls went live on TV during the Columbine shootings; even the seminal 1970 image of the Kent State shootings was taken by photojournalism student John Filo.

But the shootings also proved technology's limits. Some online postings about deaths and survivals proved false, while V.T.'s e-mail warnings to students were too little, too late. And the hardware for comprehending cruelty--the human brain and heart--has yet to be upgraded. On April 16, they were overloaded.