Yesterday, for someone reading this in the future, was Monday, 15th April 2013.

The day a whole bunch of people got a very legitimate excuse for not finishing the Boston Marathon.

It was also the day I got to observe the unfolding reactions of a terrorism-primed society with social media.

I learned a lot.

Kinda. Mostly, I observed a lot. I’m not sure if I processed that into actual ‘learning’, because a lot of it followed the path I expected it to follow. Disaster of any type seems to cause people to fall into occasionally overlapping categories, or something, and cause them to do predictable things.

Sometimes, those things are really upsetting.

I won’t be able to list them all, because I don’t think I managed to observe every possible reaction. Obviously. And the reactions are still ongoing.

But, what the hell. I need content.

Care Bear Share

The most common reaction after any event — a major weather event, some geological catastrophe, or a man-made incident like Boston, is a massive outpouring of feelgood, fully public sympathy.

I call it the ‘Care Bear Share’. As of five minutes ago, anyway, because I needed to come up with a category.

You know what I’m talking about. “Share this image of a lit candle for the people of Boston. Share this image of the sports team logos because they’re normally rivals but we stand with them now. Share this or you don’t care.”

Also: ‘My heart goes out’ and ‘#PrayersForBoston’.

There are also the extremes. People who post about how they just spent hours hiding under a blanket, weeping for the people involved, even though nobody they knew was even within a hundred miles of the incident.

Now, I know it’s good to care, and I know I’m probably a broken person for not giving a single shit that a child died, or that someone lost their legs. I didn’t know them. They were completely outside the sphere that influences me, so I don’t care at all.

And I look upon open, public outpourings of sympathy with suspicion — the same way I look at ‘I just donated’ announcements with suspicion.

Some of these people might be doing it completely innocently — sharing their caring because they think it’s expected, because everyone else is doing it. But some of them are doing it because it makes them feel better. Some of them are doing it because they know it’ll make them look good.

And it’s easy. It’s easy to tweet about how much you care, how profoundly affected you’ve been. It’s easy to get attention that way.

Get that share number up, and maybe you’ll get more people in your group. Care enough on Twitter, and you’ll get more followers.

With enough text-based expressions of caring, maybe the world will become a magical place full of goodness and puppies.

Or not.

Mr. Rogers

A subset of the Care Bear Share, maybe, but not in the negative sense, or the ‘you have undiagnosed mental health issues, please seek help’ sense.

I saw a lot of Mr. Rogers yesterday. You may’ve seen a lot of him, too.

“Look for the helpers.”

This wasn’t bad or annoying. It actually seemed pretty good, to me. But I like Mr. Rogers — I can’t call him Fred, for some reason. I respect him. He was a genuinely nice guy, and I kinda feel bad that, were he to start up today, people would be suspicious of him, and maybe make accusations of kiddie-fiddling.

Look for the helpers — the people who ran toward the explosions instead of away from them. The people who were there to provide minor medical care to runners, who also had trauma training.

Some people took this a little too far. In an attempt to restate it, Oswalt made the message rather toxic with his remark about ‘poisonous group of broken sociopaths’.

The Opportunists

Within the first few hours of yesterday’s Nothing But Boston News Marathon, I saw a post on facebook: the first scam groups were being set up to collect money from people who go one step beyond caring, but only to the point of sending a few dollars to the first group they see.

This is unsurprising. You’re always going to have someone out there trying to profit. In the first few hours, it’s going to be one of two things: hastily made shirts, and scams.

The Vultures

Vultures and opportunists are different because I say so.

The Vultures are the ones who tune in to multiple news sources and watch every moment of the unfolding story.

Basically: something bad has happened. Let’s ride the thermals until it dies.

I’m a Vulture.

The instant I heard about it, I stopped watching a documentary and switched over to CNN. I loaded the live finish line webcam. I looked at Twitter. I rode those fucking thermals for hours.

I was rewarded, just like I was rewarded for watching the 9/11 live coverage. I watched CNN rewind the video of the explosions instead of just looping the clip. I saw a man blown over, and magically get back up again.

I made jokes instead of caring. I was doubtful without being conspiratorial [except when joking]. But I was right there. Possibly in the kettle, or the venue, depending on whether or not the vultures eventually settled into trees.

A group of circling vultures, by the way, is called a kettle. A group in trees is called a venue, volt, or committee.

I did not, however, join the wake.

A wake is a group of vultures feeding. That’s what’s going on today.

The Insiders

These people are probably the most interesting, next to a group I haven’t gotten to yet.

These people claim to have inside sources. They’re somehow privy to the secret parts of the event, and they’re going to share.

I saw a tweet yesterday while watching the live Finish Line cam. The twit in question claimed to know a nurse at one of the hospitals. That nurse told the twit: thousands of limbs blown off, babies on fire.

Seriously.

I would’ve gotten a screen shot if it hadn’t been wiped away by the next five tweets almost instantly.

I also saw tweets about ‘suspect in custody’, which probably led to the Huffington Post article about a man in the hospital being questioned, being surrounded by police presence.

I saw things about simultaneous bombs going off in other states.

Hell, I even heard about a friend of a friend stating that his ‘army group’ was monitoring transmissions.

His ‘army group’? Civil war reenactors.

Basically: a lot of confusion, and a lot of sensationalism, and maybe some deliberate deception.

Some people just want to be special.

The Hijackers

Something’s happened! How can we use it to further our cause!

Apparently, this is how:

Except it really just disgusts people, so you should probably fucking stop it.

Yes, you’ve done wrong. You know you’ve done wrong when you manage to put off a person as apathetic as I am.

The Unmedicated Schizophrenics

My very first comment, on the very first post I saw about the explosions, was: ‘Conspiracies in 3, 2….’

Well, roughly. I may be paraphrasing, out of laziness. Which may or may not be a conspiracy.

Except: I was right. Within minutes, there were conspiracies. Or, vague accusations of ‘false flag’, and one wild conspiracy about the bombing being deliberate, to take the attention off this Gosnell guy’s trial.

The first question at one of the press conferences was about whether or not this was a ‘false flag operation meant to erode our liberties’.

There was even a hastily removed video of one of the news broadcasts in which a guy narrates about ‘blood and gore’ turning into a ‘mysterious object’ when a man walks in front of the camera.

There will be much more of this in the coming weeks.

The Rest

Everything else is scattered, broad, or doesn’t fall into a category I can come up with. Like the surprising-to-me response by Cracked — they removed an article I was planning on reading today.

That kinda bugs me. Boston wasn’t destroyed.

What else bugs me? All the tossing about of words like ‘psychotic’ and ‘sociopath’. I thought, for a minute, that I saw a trend toward not making mental illness equivalent to ‘dangerous potential felon’, but I was wrong.

Such comments are usually followed by ‘anyone can find this on the internet’ — a phrase I heard repeatedly from several news-people on CNN yesterday.

That’s a comment that makes me nervous. Not as nervous as the weird repetitions and feed glitches the unmedicated schizophrenics will fixate on [they’d repeat phrases or words — I swear one of them actually said ‘routine, routine’], or, maybe, not the same kind of nervous. More, ‘How will this mass of people respond to this’.

If I allow myself to think about that for too long, I’ll come up with some frightening possibilities. Damn near conspiritarded, paranoid possibilities, like people gleefully ‘doing their duty’ — reporting me for my varied and occasionally morbid interests. And, since I’ve made my mental issues public? Well, that’s just one more reason, right?

It’s going to take some time to see the results of what happened yesterday. Most of the people I’ve covered here won’t continue to react — they’ll find something else to react to.

Once the corpse is picked clean.