A mile wide, an inch deep

The Boston Marathon bombing was a shocking event.
But what happened afterwards on social media was just as disturbing in its own way.
For professional reasons I had to keep an eye on the unfolding drama, among other things following the Twitter hashtag #bostonmarathon.
The Tweets which poured out combined grief, fear and almost a sense of collective panic mixed with a desire for revenge.
Fear and revenge can be a poisonous mixture, though. Put that together with some amateurishly inept web-only news sources and you had a situation where innocents were identified as suspects and police and the FBI were being bombarded with useless information.
We now know from a solid piece of reporting by the Washington Post, among others, that this at the very least complicated the investigation - and that the eventual decision to release images of the two prime suspects was taken partly in order to prevent any more innocents being fingered.
There was worse. Shocking images of the bomb victims were tweeted (sometimes with 'ooh, this is awful' comments), while at the end a gruesome photograph of one of the suspects was tweeted after his death.
This wasn't social media's finest hour.
Thanks to the web, I routinely read a few foreign newspapers these days, among them the Washington Post and the Sydney Morning Herald.
The Washington Post carried a forensically detailed account of the Boston bombing investigation which lifted the lid on the impact social media had on the work of the police and the FBI. The Post's reporting also told the story in an authoritative depth which social media hasn't come close to.
The same day, the Sydney Morning Herald carried a story about the habits of young people and social media, highlighting a tendency to sample lots but look into little.
In short, it suggested they live their lives "a mile wide, an inch deep".
Which pretty much summed up what social media did with the Boston bombing.