Could You Hear us Then? Cell Phones as Media Agents.

I remember when my mother got her first cell phone in the fall of 1999. She brought it home as part of her work life and the rest of the household met it with complete indifference. It was just a thing, a condition of the job, something that would ring occasionally and we wouldn’t pay attention to any other time.

Fast forward ten years, and cell phones are almost like earrings – we put them on for the entire day and eventually stop noticing they’re there at all. Cell phones of today have custom covers, ringtones, pictures, and themes; they come packed with Internet browsers, cameras, mp3 players, video recorders, calculators, memory cards, address books, schedules. . . Need I say more?

Cell phones exploded out of the office and into the home, and it’s been a good thing, right?

Well. . .

The case I’m considering is that of the 1999 high school shooting in Littleton, Colorado. What everyone knows is that the shooters, members of the Trench Coat Mafia, targeted Christians and ethnic minorities, including a young girl named Cassie Bernall who was shot and killed for confessing her belief in God, an act so startling and powerful that it was adapted into a book called She Said Yes. Quite the day, right?

Well, something’s been creeping back into the cultural consciousness about Columbine, and the reality is that. . .well, that wasn’t the reality. What has come to light is that the shooters weren’t, in fact, members of the Trench Coat Mafia; the Trench Coat Mafia had been a video game club a number of years previous at Columbine, a club that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris (the shooters) had never even attended. People studying the Columbine massacre have come to widely accept that there was no pattern of Klebold’s and Harris’ victims – even the Cassie Bernall story is probably fiction.

An article published on CNN’s website this past spring, around the tenth anniversary of the shootings, brings these realities to light and pushes for information of the truth about Columbine to be immediately substituted into the cultural perception of the rampage – but it took ten years for the truth to come to light in a mainstream fashion.

And the article says that cell phones were probably to blame.

1999 was a prominent year for technology, what with the Y2K scare, and cell phones were just picking up speed in domestic settings. When Klebold and Harris started shooting at their classmates, some of the most immediate information picked up by news stations was relayed to them by insiders or outsiders via cell phones; the media took this information, ran with it, and painted a picture of trench coat-clad neo-Nazis with automatic rifles.

Ten years ago, the media didn’t know how to treat cell phones; anyone calling the stations was a credible witness, and so the cultural narrative of Columbine was painted.

Today, we really do take cell phones for granted. We’re constantly hooked in to the rest of our friends through texting, can find their houses by handheld GPS, can end the evening by typing our next date into our tiny calendars, and can set alarms to wake us up the next morning – when we’ll press our snooze buttons.

Ten years ago, one phone call might’ve shaped the way millions of people thought.

Quite the day, right?