5th anniversary of 9/11
On the 5th anniversary of 9/11, I stopped to reflect on changes to what it means to live in the United States since the attacks. It's easiest to see all of the travel changes, especially after having just gotten off an airplane, but the the twin dogs of war and terrorism don't affect most of us on a daily basis. I live in the Washington, D.C. area, which, outside of New York, was most affected by the terrorist attacks 5 years ago and sure, we see the differences, mostly as you get close to the White House. Camouflaged missile launchers near the Pentagon, snipers on roofs, closed streets and that sort of thing. The fashion statement of the decade for DC buildings is the ubiquitious bollard, the solid concrete flower pot strategically positioned to stop suicide car bombers.
One clear difference that's rarely touted is our casual use of the Internet. Remember that in 2001, there was no Myspace, YouTube or Facebook and most people didn't use IM, certainly not many adults. There were effectively no blogs. 9/11 was the first day many people actually used the SMS capabilities of their cell phone, since the normal phone system was suspect.
Still five years ago, we were all glued to the television set. If and when there is a future terrorist attack, it will be very different. Television news is not the only place to go for up-to-the-minute news anymore--the Internet has come into its own and will be the primary source of communication from now until the foreseeable future. If there were another attack, there would be dozens of blogs posting realtime pictures and frantically updating the text. We saw some of that with Katrina.
We are now responsible for our own news. We're no longer just the readers, but the cameramen, the reporters, the editors. In the future, we will all be the media and will have no one to blame for biases and lousy reporting but ourselves.
Posted on September 12, 2006
