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.

Eight Years Later

It is that moment that my generation will always remember.

On September 11, 2001, I was just entering my first full week of high school. I was in second period World History class with Ms. Croley when the announcement was made. I was sitting in the third seat of the second row on the left-hand side of classroom #100 at St. Pius X. She turned off the projector and told us to say a prayer. It was a few hours later (in Ms. Cebula's fifth period Physical Science class) that I saw the video for the first time. I'm not sure how much later it was before I believed it was real.

Eight years later, we still haven't caught Osama. We still haven't rebuilt much of anything on that block in lower Manhattan. But, we also haven't been attacked again. I don't know if that's a victory or not, but at least its not a loss. The important thing is to remember those who died, thank those who have kept us safe since then, and (most importantly) to resist the temptation to trade our rights in name of security, despite the fear that might encourage us to do so.

Andrew Sullivan offers four things we have learned from the war that began on 9/11:

"The first is that total security is impossible in a free society.

I understand deeply the hankering for it in the ashes of the World Trade Center. But we should all acknowledge that a free society will never be able to have 100 percent level of success against those who are prepared to kill themselves in acts of terror. The Cheney promise is a mirage - and getting there could mean losing far more than we gain.

The second is that defeating this menace is not amenable to conventional military power; and that intervention in Muslim countries needs to be calibrated very, very carefully to avoid generating more terror than we manage to suppress.

The third is that nation-building and counter-insurgency in countries which are barely nations and failed states is a century-long enterprise. Occupations that long are imperial ventures. Imperial ventures can become self-sustaining. They are harder to end than government programs, because they are, in part, a government program. Unless they can be shown to drastically reduce the terror threat to the West, they can be ghastly errors. The war in Iraq remains such a ghastly error. The war in Afghanistan, alas, now another. A great power with the debt levels of the US right now is not Britain in the early 19th century; it's Britain in the early 20th century. Empire has to be paid for. And we have long since run out of money.

Fourth. We should not grant the enemy more allure than he deserves. Al Qaeda is now weaker than it once was - rejected by the people in Iraq and Jordan, decimated by the military and CIA under Bush and Obama. They did not have access to weapons of mass destruction, or they would have used them a long time ago. Smarter, more targeted detection, surveillance, skilled interrogation (not sadistic brutality), more skilled and culturally-attuned human intelligence: these are the skills we need."