“For better or for worse, we have become the Facebook generation,” Cornell University student Erica Fink wrote in an article for The Cornell Daily Sun in April. The article was written in response to the way students utilized Facebook after the tragedy at Virginia Polytechnic Institute the day before.

On April 16, 2007, 23-year-old Virginia Tech student Cho Seung-Hui opened fire on Virginia Tech’s campus, killing 32 students and professors before taking his own life. The event is considered to be the deadliest shooting rampage in American history.

Cell phones were not working on campus that day, according to student sources. When the university website and e-mail also crashed, students turned to Facebook. The site is independently run, and is not affiliated with any of the university’s networks, so it was not affected by the chaos at Virginia Tech.

Katie Olson, a sophomore at Virginia Tech, created the Facebook group “I’m okay at VT” with the simple description “Let all your friends know you are okay today.” More than 3,300 Virginia Tech students had joined the group by the day after the shootings.

Under “recent news” on the group’s homepage, Olson posted a list of all 32 victims and continuously posted updates about the condition of students who were injured or hospitalized. The discussion board contained reminders about a candlelight vigil held the Tuesday following the shootings and the “Hokie Hope Day” held the following Friday. A list of all the classes held in Norris Hall (where the shooting took place) on Monday, April 16 was also posted and included the names of the professors and the number of students enrolled in each class to assist students in figuring out if anyone they knew might have been involved. Students used the group’s wall to ask about updated news on friends and fellow Hokies, as well as telling each other they were safe.

“Facebook tracks, maps out and links your social network; it’s the perfect thing for students when crisis hits,” Jeff Hancock, a communications professor at Cornell University, was quoted as saying in Fink’s article.

For Virginia Tech students who did not join Olson’s group, many let their friends and family know they were OK by updating their status on Facebook. A feature normally reserved for trivial or humorous updates, a status update was some students’ only way of communicating with loved ones.

At the conclusion of her article, Fink wrote about how Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg could never have guessed all the uses Facebook would come to have when he created the site back in 2004.