On April 12, an 18-year-old blogger with the handle ntcoolfool posted a brief, unexceptional tribute to the deceased American novelist Kurt Vonnegut, for which he received three equally unexceptional responses. On Monday, ntcoolfool’s blog became a scrolling newsreel, providing harrowing details, replete with photos and video footage, of a massacre unfolding below his window. The Virginia Tech university student, identified on his website as Bryce Carter, began reporting in real-time, portraying a quiet campus thrust into a mini war zone.

In a post entitled "Safe and rather scared…,” Mr Carter wrote:

“I walked with my friend to his dorm to get his stuff as an omniscient announcement echoed across campus: ‘This is an emergency. This is an emergency. Take shelter in doors immediately. Stay away from windows and remain inside.’ Right on cue, I heard several faint gunshots from across campus... The announcement repeated as the campus emptied and police ran across campus. I saw snipers on the library.”

Then, further down, he writes: “Rumor has it the first shooting took place at 7am. It took them 3 hours to shut down campus since then? I went to class at 9. Wtf.”

Not your typical Monday morning on campus.

Before the world’s media could converge on the university town of Blacksburg, Virginia, student blogs, message boards, Facebook and MySpace pages went into action, delivering emotional, first-person, blow-by-blow reportage of Monday’s rampage that left 33 students and teachers dead. And this wasn’t soppy stuff. Armed with little more than a Nokia N70 camera phone, a classroom notebook, and a reliable net connection (evidentally, that’s all you need these days to get on CNN, or better, YouTube), these students produced incredibly lucid, brazen journalism.

And after the CNN trucks pack up, and the newspaper reporters put away their laptops, heading for the next news story, these forums will continue to chronicle the emotion and anger that has ripped apart this little community.

Within hours, the world’s netizens flocked by the tens of thousands to social network sites such as Facebook and MySpace to offer their condolences, share their grief and memories of the deceased, and vent. On thousands of blogs, little black ribbons emblazoned with the school letters “VT” appeared overnight, tender, ten-kilobit tributes, a perfectly natural expression of solidarity for a generation that finds so much solace in a keyboard and mouse.

And, this being the web, these forums have also become a place to swap conspiracy theories (a lone gunman killing 32? He must have had help, is one common hypothesis), to make sweeping generalisations about the violent nature of American culture (“Americans love killing”, reads one YouTube posting), and to make amateur psychoanalytical assessments of the gunman, Cho Seung Hui , all hiding behind anonymous nicknames.

At its ugliest, this free-flowing forum gave rise to vigilantism. Wayward cyber sleuths combed blogs in the hopes of unmasking the killer in the hours before we knew his name. Working with details emerging from the early press accounts – male, Asian, guns, and little more – they fingered the wrong guy, a Virginia Tech student whose biggest crime is that he likes to pose with rifles. Oops.

The web, so reliable in helping us track down a florist who delivers at the weekend or some obscure fact about Frederick II, is a natural venue for us to turn as we seek explanations for the senseless acts of others. It sometimes seems odd that we cannot plug “Why do kids kill?” into Google or Yahoo! and find a satisfactory explanation. Undeterred, we continue to search, using the collective observations and theories from around this little world to fill in the pieces of the puzzle.

Who was Cho Seung Hui? Why drove him to kill? Some clues are trickling in, but we’ll never know for sure. But thanks to the likes of ntcoolfool and the outpouring of emotion expressed by his peers, today we have a clearer glimpse of this digitally-savvy generation, one that is not afraid to tell it like it is.

This is the first tragedy of this magnitude to strike the Facebook generation, and they have responded by letting us into their world, constructing an enduring web-based tribute for all the world and all the ages to see. Undoubtedly, it will not be enough to put an end to America’s string of school shootings, but it does establish an important dialogue between a college town in rural Virginia and the rest of the world. In doing so, perhaps we can arrive at some answers.

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Bernhard Warner, formerly Reuters' internet correspondent in Europe and senior editor for The Industry Standard Europe, writes about technology, the internet and media industries. He can be reached at techscribe@gmail.com