Keith Osentoski said he should have been studying for a final exam. Instead, the George Washington University (GWU) junior was thumbing through his iPhone Sunday night when campus Twitter chatter said students were gathering outside the White House to celebrate the death of Osama bin Laden.
Osentoski was one of more than 1,000 GWU students who flocked into the streets of Washington, D.C. after President Obama announced that a team of Navy SEALS had killed the famed terrorist leader, who had evaded authorities for a decade.
No bin Laden-specific Twitter hashtags emerged in the minutes after Obama’s late-night national address among GWU students, but opinions and celebration invitations flooded the social media site throughout the night and into the wee hours of Monday.
“It was more of a spontaneous sharing of ideas,” Osentoski said. “I think of it as a cascade.”
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Reports of spontaneous celebrations erupted at some the country’s best-known campuses, including Stanford University, Notre Dame, and Ohio State University.
Some students didn’t just use Twitter and Facebook to organize impromptu get-togethers, but learned of bin Laden’s death via friends’ posts, according to reports from several campus newspapers.
On Twitter, someone posted a link to a photo of celebrations at the University of Delaware and called it an “intense sense of closure for people who were frightened little kids in ’01.”
“I think the feeling Sunday night was of celebrating justice and of unifying as Americans,” said Osentoski, a political communications major. “The feeling there was tremendous. I stood with about 20 of my fraternity brothers in a crowd of thousands, draped in an American flag, chanting USA, and singing the National Anthem. … It was that American moment each generation has that will stick with us forever.”
Sean Morrow, a senior at Clark University in Massachusetts, watched Sunday night as his friends’ Facebook pages lit up with photos and status updates from various impromptu gatherings on other campuses.
“It’s kind of surreal to watch people celebrating someone’s death,” says Morrow, a political science major. But he understands it because, for him and many others his age, bin Laden was their boogeyman, “the main negative person of our generation.”
Richard Laermer, a publicist in New York who tracks youth trends, calls events like college campus celebrations “bolts from the blue,” which resonate until the next hot topic arises on Twitter.
“Twitter was all about Osama bin Laden until 5 a.m. (Monday) when suddenly the hottest topic was the rap singer Drake, who has a new duet out,” says Laermer, author of the book “2011: Trendspotting for the Next Decade.”
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Menachem Wecker, cofounder of the Association for Social Media and Higher Education and a staff writer at a GWU publication, said that most students there don’t use the school’s Twitter hashtag to engage the campus community, but students who regularly seek social media interaction can create a stir during important events.
“What we are seeing is a very engaged minority on campus that is sharing everything from news clips to information about campus events, and from excitement about the GW brand to occasional criticism,” Wecker said. “It’s fair to say that important events, like the news about Bin Laden, will dominate the kinds of tweets that GW students send out to the conversation tag, but the constant volume shows that the university is lucky to have some of the most digitally savvy and social media engaged students around.”
Twitter has become college students’ go-to social media tool in organizing campus gatherings, he said, because “it is so rapid-fire and because it is very search engine-optimized,” meaning Twitter allows students to easily monitor hashtags.
Not all jubilant GWU students learned about the White House gathering through social media. Zach Krahmer, a university sophomore, said a glance out of his dorm window was all he needed to join the celebration.
“There was already a crowd and that’s when my friends and I decided to head over,” said Krahmer, a civil engineering major. “It was crazy — people just kept showing up. There was a lot of celebration. People were climbing lamp posts and crowd surfing. There was even a guy in a Spiderman outfit up in the trees. Whether or not we fully understood what Osama’s death meant to the U.S., we gathered because we knew things would be different from here out.”
Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.
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