One of my previous blogs was about the Cleveland shooting and how the media covered the story and described the shooter, Asa H. Coon, by his race- "white." I was surprised to see someone left a comment for me! (I get excited...no one ever leaves comments, much less someone famous!) It turns out, the person who left a comment was Loren Coleman, an esteemed international consultant, successful author, credited professor, and award winning researcher of the "Copycat Theory."(Imagine my excitement after I read his blog and googled his name!) According to his blog: "The copycat effect is what happens when the media makes an event into a "hot death story" and then via behavior contagion, more deaths, suicides, murders, and more occur in a regularly predictive cycle, as per the book The Copycat Effect (Paraview Pocket - Simon and Schuster)."
His work and research includes highly publicized masacres like Columbine, Virgina Tech, Heaven's Gate, Waco, and more. He also predicted an increase in school shootings after the Dawson College shooting in 2006.
Coleman blames some of the "copycat effect" on the media, for their coverage of events such as these. When the media creates stereotypes from shootings, it basically encourages the other sicko's to take notice-recreate, and out-do the last occurance. He takes a really interesting stance on the topic of race in the media, that really corelates with our class studies. Here are the links to his blog and his entry in Wikipedia.
http://copycateffect.blogspot.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loren_Coleman
So, I got "blogged" by a famous person--pretty cool.
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