Eva Bradley: Infamy at the push of a post button

US reporter Alison Parker and cameraman colleague Adam Ward were shot by a disgruntled colleague.

Hands up if you hate Facebook? But also love it? You can't stand Twitter ... but you check your tweets at every red light?

Social media has become just like the subject of a heartbreaking U2 song. We can't live with or without it.

Despite it being a key tool of trade for United States reporter Alison Parker and cameraman colleague Adam Ward, I doubt either of them could have imagined they would die on (and perhaps even because of) a social media platform.

If I think very, very hard I can sort of see how someone with a few screws loose might consider arbitrarily ending another person's life.

People get angry ... anger festers. Guns in America are for sale on just about every street corner and there is enough violence on TV to make the act of shooting someone seem more like a movie scene than a real-life (and death) crime scene.

But to tweet about it? To strap on a Go-Pro, gun down unarmed people and then post the footage to Facebook?

That is a slide down the slippery slope of mental health that I just can't comprehend.

Although the blame rests ultimately with the person who pulled the trigger, it's hard not to wonder just how responsible the advent of social media is for creating a platform where unstable nobodies can instantly turn themselves into infamous somebodies with the click of a trigger and the push of a post button.

"Going out in a blaze of glory" isn't a new cliche. It's just that the blaze was never able to burn so brightly or scar so many as it dimmed and then died.

The universality of Facebook is frightening, yet also surreal. It seems strange that the interface I'm so familiar with and use to chat benignly to friends and family is just as familiar to Isis fighters who upload videos of beheadings and disturbed gunmen with grudges who plan a public execution on live TV then tweet about it.

Do these depraved people use the same account to send their mum a message on Mother's Day? Do they scroll through their newsfeed and occasionally giggle at the cute and omnipresent cat videos? I suppose they must.

Even abnormal people do normal things most of the time.

But the finger of blame I'm pointing at social media isn't only directed at the way it facilitates unspeakable acts. It is also about the way it fosters them by shaping a new world where despite easier ways to "communicate", we have become more isolated, and more self-absorbed as well.

Whether WDBJ shooter Vester Flanagan was unfairly maligned by his former colleagues or not, you can bet he has spent the past couple of years since his dismissal raging every time they posted yet another "look at my great life on TV" selfie.

Connected to the whole world via a keyboard and yet perhaps unspeakably alone, Flanagan lost touch with reality and began to style a new one that would put him at the centre of the story. It worked. What I wonder about is whether he would have shot his former colleagues if the potential hadn't existed to become an international headline in the process. Did Parker and Ward die because they had really, really, really annoyed someone? Or because they were the means to an end ... on social media?

Eva Bradley is a columnist and photographer.