145;I146;m gonna talk 038; reach out to every loner146;

Tokens of mourning among college students are proliferating this week as they did in May 1970, when black armbands signalled solidarity with the students at Kent State.

Tokens of mourning among college students are proliferating this week as they did in May 1970, when black armbands signalled solidarity with the students at Kent State. But the memento mori today is an intangible illustration, a glossy loop of pixilated fabric, created by an anonymous graphic designer, set off with a Photoshop shadow and seemingly fastened, as if by a brooch, with a conjoined VT: Virginia Tech.

Since Monday, when 33 people were shot and killed at that university, the black-ribbon graphic has become ubiquitous on Facebook.com, the social networking site. Here students from all over the world display the ribbon, along with words of comfort or wails of sorrow. Some have cautioned against bigoted descriptions of the gunman, Cho Seung-Hui. Others have published bigoted descriptions.

Amid the bouquets left for the dead on Facebook, Cho also emerged as a source of fascination. Posters debate whether to pray for him; some even propose singling him or his family out for a particular prayer.

M J Lacombe contributed a poem, 8220;The Virginia Massacre,8221; to one of the memorial pages. It included this stanza: 8220;The massacre started at Virginia Tech, in Norris Hall/ Where a young student decided to end it all/By 9:00 am a student and advisor were gone/but for Cho Seung-Hui, the hunt was still on.8221;

A poem by Loo Parr, another poster, contained this passage: From the one boy/ The killer now killed./ The vindictive victim/Of what we don8217;t know./And coincidentally Korean./A prejudice is made.

As masses of mourners assemble at sites like Facebook and MySpace.com 8212; traffic to Facebook increased more than fivefold between Sunday and Monday 8212; a slogan also surfaced. It8217;s a sign of the times, and has unmistakable poignancy for devotees of social-networking websites. It8217;s simple: 8220;Reach out to loners.8221;

8220;After what happened on 4/16/07,8221; read one page. 8220;I8217;m gonna talk 038; reach out to every loner.8221;

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Others pledged to smile at people on the street, to greet quiet people and even to visit those who seem isolated.

Yesterday afternoon Pierre-Olivier Laforce, who lists himself as a student at the Eacute;cole Secondaire Donnacona in Quebec, wrote: 8220;let this Shooting teach us all a lesson. The truth is ours8230;we have a duty to be true to ourselfs. Smile at people you usualy never even looked at8230; talk to people u hated.8221;

The word loner has shown up regularly in the news media8217;s descriptions of Cho, and it seems to have struck a chord with users of Facebook, for whom would-be friends 8212; other users who respond to electronic overtures, often reciprocally8212;sometimes seem more numerous than strangers. To those familiar with older connotations of the word 8220;friend,8221; a Facebook or MySpace friend might be better described as a 8220;correspondent.8221;

Some students whose electronic contacts number in the hundreds or even thousands evidently find the idea of a young man without a single friend almost unfathomable, a source of collective guilt.

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8220;I am not trying to defend Cho,8221; wrote Rachel Thompson on a memorial page. She went on: 8220;He was really quiet and never spoke. Some people put up such strong barriers to others to see who really wants to break those barriers down and find out who they really are. He was a sad soul and nothing can change what he did, but his family is also suffering from this tragedy just like the other victim8217;s families, they too lost a child.8221;

8211;VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN