In 2001, a smart phone could only be found in the Sunday funny papers with Dick Tracy. No one texted or played Angry-Crush from the palm of their hand. Social 'media' was the local watering hole, backyard BBQ, or nightly news. Hash-tag was a list of numbers. Facebook was still 3 years out, and twitter was a pated state for a Disney cartoon animal. The grammatically tortured 'You've got mail' within the screeching dial-up universe of AOL was the closest approximation to a message 'app.'
From Garrett M. Graff at Wired:
"Most of us watched the same thing on that day, united in front of millions of televisions in a way that the nation perhaps hadn’t been since the days of the Kennedy assassination.RTWT
Yet part of the reason we all watched the same thing on TV was that, technologically speaking, we were living in a comparative dark age 18 years ago. Apple’s stock was $1.24 on September 10, and according to WIRED, one of the hot new gadgets was the Casio WQV3D-8 wristwatch.
The web was still in its awkward adolescence, AOL the world’s dominant homepage, MSNBC still a partnership between Microsoft and NBC. (Do most viewers today even remember that the “MS” once referred to Microsoft?) News websites slowed to a crawl under the heavy traffic loads, and so the go-to choice was television. As Friend wrote in his book, Watching the World Change, “The city, the nation, and the human race looked on as one unblinking eye.”
I was continually struck in my research by how few alternative sources of information many people had—even those close to the attacks and those seemingly at the epicenter of national leadership. For the entourage traveling with President Bush in Sarasota, Florida, the cutting-edge communication tool that provided the first information about the attacks was a pager.
...On 9/11, there were just three videographers, all coincidentally foreigners—a French filmmaker, a German artist, and a Czech tourist—who captured the impact of the first plane in New York City. Only two security cameras at the Pentagon are known to have captured the impact of the plane there. In Pennsylvania, there is literally only a video of the mushroom cloud rising from the field in the moments after Flight 93 crashed. It’s safe to say that today there would be scores, hundreds or even thousands, of photos and videos of low-flying planes hitting the towers and the Pentagon or diving over the rolling hills of Pennsylvania.
Today, there would be Facebook Live video, tweets, and Instagram posts from the streets below, from people caught in the impact zones, and most likely from victims trapped above the crash zones in the World Trade Centers—perhaps even from aboard the hijacked planes themselves. We would know intimately the sights and sounds that those trapped amid the day’s horrors experienced in their final moments and would be bombarded by the tragic images of people jumping or falling from the World Trade Center.
We would see what it was like to have been inside the burning Pentagon as an inferno spread. There would have been live images and videos nearly instantly from the field outside Shanksville where Flight 93 crashed, those first near the scene—which, in 2001 in Shanksville, were workers from a nearby scrapyard and two coal truck drivers who saw the plane crash as they drove down an adjacent road—would have had in their pockets more advanced tools today than the news reporters and photographers who rushed to the scene hours later had back then. (After all, it’s not uncommon now to have video from inside mass shootings or aviation accidents.)
If today’s communications technology had existed in 2001, it’s even possible that, just as the mass shooter in New Zealand broadcast his massacre on Facebook, the 9/11 hijackers themselves might have broadcast their own attack—their goal, of course, to spread maximum terror, fear, and trauma.
And in the event of a 9/11-style occurrence today, we would almost surely be less united as a nation around our televisions than around our computers and our phones; searching through Facebook for messages from friends and family. Mark Zuckerberg’s website, which was still two and a half years in the future on 9/11, would today almost certainly activate its “Safety Check” button for all of New York and Washington, DC, maybe even for the entire country, telling users to “Mark Yourself Safe.”
We would scour LinkedIn to determine if we knew anyone who worked at the companies in the impact zone, and we’d scroll through Twitter as a million rumors and hot takes bloomed—who did it, what the nation’s reaction should be, whose fault it all was. There would be Vox.com explainers about al-Qaeda and Heavy.com Fast Facts You Need to Know.
On Citizen, civilians would post their photos and videos of the attack, and Next Door would be flooded with reports of the missing. We would Google “Taliban” and end up reading Wikipedia to explain our new enemies to us, as Google Earth sleuths pointed out al-Qaeda’s training camps outside Kandahar.
The flood of information, of reports true, false, and somewhere in between, would overwhelm us. Even in 2001, the day was filled with chaos—reports of a car bomb at the State Department and of additional plane crashes and attacks in places like Cleveland, among other rumors—so it seems almost impossible to imagine how many unsubstantiated claims would spread online, some presumably helped along by online bots and trolls, others spread in fever swamps like 8Chan."
