For those of you living under a rock, Maurice Clemmons walked into a coffee shop in Lakeland WA on Sunday morning and shot and killed 4 local police officers in cold blood. They were having their morning coffee preparing to go on shift when Clemmons walked in and shot them with no warning or provocation. There are now 9 children left without a father or mother. I have no mercy for anyone like this. A massive manhunt was underway for days, with a couple of houses under siege for hours in a desperate search for this armed killer. Clemmons was subsequently found and shot trying to escape by a lone cop early on Tuesday morning in Seattle. So yesterday, like a lot of other Seattleites who are wired in, I received many copies of dead cop-killer, Maurice Clemmons, in my Inbox.

Just this afternoon, the Seattle P-I’s 911 Police Blog reports that the Seattle police are looking into how and where the picture was taken and circulated. (Click HERE to read their post.) I couldn’t help myself – I had to post a comment:

“In the past, public hangings and scarlet letters would reinforce the evil of some people’s ways to everyone in the village, especially our children. In this day and age of television and Internet, we seem to have gotten so caught up with political correctness that most of the major news networks in Seattle did not even allow the fact that the suspect was black to be announced by their newscasters. Everyone has been getting more and more detached from events in the real world.

“So now someone actually circulates a real picture of an obviously guilty dead criminal to everyone online and suddenly it’s a bad thing? I suspect that this type of thing is only going to happen more because no one will be able to stop it. And I believe it may actually do some good in showing a visual example of a proper conclusion for being evil. Do we now consider ourselves so ‘civilized’ now that being able to see a dead bad guy has no redeeming social value?

“I personally have to admit a cathartic sense of relief and joy in seeing one of the bad guys met his just desserts in a timely fashion. Enough political correctness in Seattle already!”

Anyway, the point I really wanted to make was that the picture is much less important than the act itself. After watching the Internet evolve over the past 25 years, we were long overdue for some interesting swings toward deeper personalization. Social networks are evolving as what I see to be another stage in the development of Marshall McLuhan’s original concept of the Global Village.

The main point to my comment on the Seattle 911 Blog was that there’s a social need to satisfy the village’s need to see justice and promote values to its members. We’ve been missing so much of this as television and computers get blamed for creating detachment. But public hangings and punishment weren’t just entertainment; shame and humiliation seem to have been slowly removed from our Western culture over the decades to the point where we’re now so detached that I see more people approaching things with little sense of guilt or shame for any of their actions.

Little soccer Moms drive around in big SUV’s surrounded by tons of steel and cut people off with no sense of shame in behaving like an idiot because they’re detached from direct contact and interaction with other drivers (sorry, soccer Moms – just an easy example). I believe subconsciously, there’s a yearning for more real connection but most people can’t quite seem to put their fingers on it or understand it just yet.

While I’m not saying that we should start posting all dead killer pictures online tomorrow, I honestly believe this is the tip of an interesting emerging phenomenon that needs closer observation and discussion.

If we look at how Twitter has been developing into a process for celebrity gossip and short bits of personalized news, it’s easy to see how it’s like a bunch of people gossiping in a small village. Same for the almost diary-like tidbits on Facebook and MySpace (maybe TMI – Too Much Information – at times!)

We’re also seeing shopping tweets in cell phones. Shopping for the best price in a store? Why not scan the bar code an go online to share the pricing to see if anyone else in your “village” can send you some scoop on a better price? And how about Waze? A social network for drivers and traffic? Useful but kinda scary!

Anyway, I feel this whole social network phenomenon is evolving into a more cohesive Global Village with its own little pockets of gossip/information sharing. I think it satisfies a deep, inner craving for that small village connection that we’ve been losing for years. As for the Seattle Police Dept.’s investigation into the leaked picture? Let it go – it just might actually do some good.