Trendng

Here is the thing that I took away from the April 3 shooting at YouTube Headquarters in San Bruno, California: The hospital. Not the thoughts and prayers, though of course that was the response from anyone who might have done something other than the traditional hand-wringing. Not the fact that the shooter was a woman, which we have been reminded makes her an anomaly among nuts with guns. Nope. It was the hospital where the victims were rushed: Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. Named for  the founder of Facebook. The wounded employees of one tech giant were taken to the emergency room funded by another.
I suppose that you could dismiss such a thing as coincidence, given the preponderance of tech companies in Silicon Valley. Google this and Yelp that and it's not like Mark Zuckerberg was actually on hand to help treat anyone. He was busy somewhere getting ready to defend himself and his company against claims that they had aided and abetted the Trump campaign by being loose with its handling of user data. This is a world where individuals are rarely mentioned as dollars and users show up in millions. The incident at YouTube headquarters involved four people: three victims and one shooter who ended up being the only fatality. This means it doesn't technically qualify as a mass shooting. No matter that everyone who clicked on a link that said "active shooter" last Tuesday feared the worst. Thoughts and prayers were online before matters had been settled on the scene. Like the President's son: "You think there’s any chance whatsoever that a mass shooters hateful Instagram and YouTube channels would be pulled immediately if they were NRA members as opposed to liberal Vegan PETA activists? Asking for a few million friends in the @NRA." So much for thought or prayers.
Nope. We live in a world of instant media and even swifter judgments. Why wait for someone to chew up all that raw footage and the comments that pile up underneath. Nobody is going to suffer from the paralysis of analysis here. Twitter and Instagram and Facebook and Snapchat and so on lit up like a War On Christmas Tree with theories and rumors about just exactly what happened. Not that it really matters. Something else will be trending soon enough. Something with a gun, no doubt.