I know why you clicked on this—it’s not clickbait. Recently, (and by recently, I mean yesterday) my school received a shooting threat. One student from another school had an altercation with a student from mine during a football game and apparently wanted to seek revenge. I try to keep myself out of the rumor mill, but this came up to me on Instagram and I took it seriously. The photo was a screenshot of someone texting a student from my school about the threat.
Last night, my stomach felt nauseous. I wasn’t sure to tell my mother or not. I ended up telling her thanks to my friend, but what really was on my mind was the potential benefit of social media in emergency situations. That sounds unusual at first because when most people think of social media, they think people posting photos of their quinoa salad they got from The Grove or an awkward family Christmas photo from 5 years ago as their #ThrowbackThursday pic.
If it wasn’t for social media, I wouldn’t have known about the threat as soon as I did. While this is rare in most cases, social media can be beneficial to spread a topic of concern or serious news that people may not know about. An example would be Twitter Moments. Many things pop up that I wouldn’t have known about if it wasn’t for a specific social media, Twitter. News via social media is the future, and it is approaching quickly. Today I found out that CVS is the first national pharmacy to limit opioid prescriptions.
Most students found out about the threat via social media. What did they do about it? They told their parents, and their parents told the school. Since most administrative staff aren’t spending hours of their free time updating their Snapchat stories or going on Instagram live, they probably wouldn’t have known anything about it. Because of social media, in a sense, the people who needed to know about the state of safety at my school found out. Today during an announcement the principal made, she thanked the students and parents who called and emailed her and staff information about everything so it could be handled correctly.
So, if you badmouth social media because you think the millennial cashier who works for you is on his phone too often during his lunch break, open your eyes and see that he may be reading some serious news.
