Eight Years Later, Part II

I was actually thinking about this earlier today, and apparently I wasn't the only one. What would 9/11 have been like if it happened today. It's only been eight years, but the technological advances, at least as far as social media goes, have been pretty amazing. What if Facebook, Twitter, and iPhones had been around back then?

Alexia Tsotsis offers a few possibilities. Although his ideas are not as detailed or imaginative as they could have been, he does at least try to answer the question.

"This realtime 24-7 Internet did not exist in 2001. We had the earliest versions of social media, instant messaging and blogs. But we had nowhere near the household use of many-to-many communication channels like Twitter and text messages. For the most part we spent 9-11 watching CNN. The Web in '09 is more about doing rather than watching. Twitter asks, "What are you doing RIGHT NOW?""

When I was thinking about this earlier today, it struck me how totally different the day would be remembered if we had all these social media tools back then. Of course the events would be the same, but the record of the day would be much more personal, and probably more horrific.

On the more positive side, there would have been less confusion, at least at first, about what had happened.

On the fifth anniversary of 9/11, CNN ran a minute-by-minute replay of their coverage of that morning. What I was struck by was the complete confusion about what had happened to the first tower. Until they actually saw the second plane impact the South Tower, the officials seemed to have no idea what happened to the North Tower. Despite having plenty of people in the street saying a plane had hit the building, they seemed completely unwilling to believe that story. If it had been today, the anchors would have just sat in the newsroom and read aloud the various postings online that reported what had happened.

In many ways, I think 9/11 is responsible for the way news coverage of major events has changed. Even without the impact of social media, personal accounts and video recordings were the major sources for journalists, many of whom couldn't get as close to the action as the people who were living through it. Obviously, the most compelling footage came from in and around Ground Zero, so the news networks picked up on that model, and, voila, you have the roots of today's heavy influence of "citizen journalism" in cable news.