There is no doubt that there are two groups of people when it comes to digital information. Those who are engaged and connected through our social media and those who are not. On both end of the spectrum these people are interacting with each other regardless of their connection to social media. Because of the difference in how informed the two sides are when it comes to digital news and information, there is a separation between the two groups that is getting larger each day.
The two ways to mend this separation is to either inform those who aren’t engaged or convince them to become engaged on their own. The latter being ideal so everyone can be on the same page.
The event that brought this to my attention was the suicide of a man in UCF Tower 1 on a Monday morning March 18. For someone like me who constantly checks my Twitter and engages with others in social media it didn’t take long for me to understand the larger picture that was really going on. But a student who I met up with later that day had only been aware of a suicide when in fact a lot more information had been revealed. Adding to the idea of this huge disconnect, is the fact that the original person who called the cops actually posted to Twitter about the incident which my friend also did not know.
Thankfully the plans of the man who committed suicide did not pan out, which was to hurt a lot of people with a heavily ammo-ed gun, and UCF avoided a huge tragedy. But beyond this there is still that separation from the digitally engaged and unengaged that still lingers, and the idea of just telling these people when we see them isn’t going to work for long. Not until we get as many people working together in a digital format with information and news flow as quickly and effectively as possible.