A neighborhood issue

This has nothing to do with information technology or transforming into an information provider of choice…sorry about that if you expected it to be.  Well, come to think of it, maybe it does.  Just I typed the first sentence, my initial reaction was to delete it.  Let’s run with it and see where it goes.

For those not in loop or geographically distant from Cedar Rapids, this revolves around the assault of a local police officer which, to date, has left him in guarded condition (coma) at the University of Iowa hospital.  The crime was allegedly carried about by at least 1 teenager who was detained after 3 teenagers had just robbed and beaten a 20 year old man.  It might be important to note my personal interest in all this is due to having grown up there with three siblings and having parents who still live there (3 blocks from the crime scene) and my sister and brother-in-law live there and run the local Dairy Queen.  Yep, it’s my old neighborhood, so I personally care about all this.  To understand how this incident has lit a fuse within some parts of the community, I recommend reading the comments contained within this Gazette article by Adam Belz (read his latest blog entry about getting a jaywalking ticket…part funny, part ironic).  There is huge range of sub-topics running strong in the various conversations and, yes by golly, this actually is clear to me to have something to do with information technology.  I’ll do my best to avoid hyperbole and stick to some observations about how IT and, in particular, social media is being used and leveraged in relation to this event.

I’ll start with a personal example.  I was called about some specific wording in a blog entry by Rick Smith.  Rick has been with the Gazette a long time and has good professional knowledge of the city and the neighborhoods therein.  His initial post on a related story was cause for a few folks to reach out to me via email and phone in order to get Rick’s direct contact information.  I read through the post and I quickly spotted the wording and concluded it was either a paraphrase or just the luck of how the words fell into place.  Either way, I didn’t hand out any phone numbers, but I did talk to Rick and he, being the professional journalist he is, made a quick editorial adjustment to the factual benefit of the post.  I mention this because some might be amazed at how quick and sensitive of a reaction was garnered by a few words in a particular order in one post in a blog.  That’s an attention-getter for me…on a personal level.  Wow.

Turning back to Adam, he is adding material to another post as well as the article noted above.  I would recommend taking a peek at the comments in both places.  Racial issues, profiling and more are already on the table, all within the space of hours.  Totally amazing.  I would also note that Adam is doing a good job pushing information via Twitter (@adambelz).  I’m not a fan of end-of-story commenting…the article cited is a perfect example of the oddly malformed diatribe that results.  Topics like this usually generate into a few commenters chucking verbally-packaged handfuls of mud at each other.  Amusing as it may be sometimes to watch, the “is too”-”is not” debate always becomes void of intellectual value rather quickly.  Oddly, though, blog posts related to this topic have been exhibiting dialogue on a higher intellectual plane.  It’s not something I put into metrics, but at least grant me the benefit of making a personal observation.

So, no big surprises hear, I guess.  I found it interesting how, for some people, apparently the same old arguments made in the same old places just doesn’t make the jump to a newer world of social media.  Hmm…