Student skimming through his twitter account (Photo by Alexis Cichy).

Thursday afternoon at around 1:00 PM, the world was shocked with an almost unfathomable event: Another shooting incident at Virginia Tech University. Included in the list of obvious differences between this incident and the massacre that occurred in 2007 (the 2007 shooting involved the death of dozens of students while the one Thursday afternoon involved the death of a police officer and the shooter, a student from a nearby university), was the change in the way the world saw the events unfold. It was through a Twitter feed.

This Twitter feed was that of Virginia Tech’s college newspaper, the Collegiate Times (@CollegiateTimes). Unlike in 2007 when the world relied on national media outlets to get real time coverage of the massacre, concerned citizens simply turned to the Twitter profile of the Collegiate Times as it updated around every ten minutes with the action happening on campus. No convoluted reports or hyperbole — only simple, organic, boots-on-the-ground journalism in 140 character bursts of vital information and subsequent reassurance.

This event is only a small example of how the ever changing world of digital media has influenced how people consume current events. No longer does the wire lengthen the amount of time it takes for the world to read what’s going on, for only in a few hours does it become old news as something new occupies  space on Facebook profiles, Twitter feeds, Spotify stories and blog posts. If one doesn’t embrace it, one becomes a “print dinosaur, trying to evolve into a new media maven,” as per Nicholas Kristof from the New York times.

It’s a new media world, and despite its daily shallow quips of often useless information, one can still take advantage of the abundant and sobering fruit it offers: real time journalism unbounded by the limitations of technology.