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This article was written a bit after the shooting at Virginia Tech, and talks about the tension in other universities and schools across the nation in the days following the attack. Many schools canceled classes in response to various threats and suspicious activities. These incidents highlight the way in which diffusion and network effects, as well as modern communications can interact in such a way that the actions of one person can have far reaching consequences.

One thing to notice is that the article doesn’t specify whether there was an increase in the number of threats against schools or whether people were just more nervous and likely to take action against responses. Chances are that it was a combination of both.  The shootings recieved a very large amount of coverage from all sources, meaning that practically everyone in the nation knew about the incident. As a result of the shooting, people who might have considered doing so but were afraid to became more likely to consider it. Others who just wanted to cause trouble might have used the shootings as a way to make their threats seem more serious. This would result in an increase in the amount of threats sent out. School officials and police, in response would be more likely to consider any threats more seriously out of fear that the threats would be more likely to be carried out. The article notes that “Most of the worries yesterday were baseless.” However, the fact that these baseless worries were taken so seriously is an example of the way in which diffusion and network effects can take a persons actions and create widespread effects.

Another interesting part of the article is the part where an official talks about how a school had to go into lockdown as a result of threat However, the direct reason for the lockdown wasn’t the school shutting down out of fear of a shooting but was a result of so many children being pulled out of school by thier parents, forcing the school officials to lock down the school.  The official called it a “roller-coaster dynamic” that resulted from “rumors circulating by e-mail and cellphones.” This rapid spread of information lead to an information cascade (”roller-coaster dynamic”) where parents reacted to the rumors and the other parents pulling out their students by pulling out their own children.