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On Sept. 11, 2001, there was no such thing as a YouTube video. Or a Facebook page. Or a Twitter feed.
By DAVID FRIEND
It is clear that the world changed on 9/11. It is
less clear exactly how it did. Ten years later the debate is still open
on the wisdom of waging war in Afghanistan and Iraq, on laws that
effectively rolled back civil liberties, on the West's relation to
Islam, on America's place in the world. (click below to read more)
But in one respect, the way the
world changed is utterly clear—the manner in which we witness news
events.
In 2001, few could have foreseen the way the attacks would coincide
with a phase change in how we observe and respond to key moments in
public life, and therefore how society and culture go on to interpret
history. Three technologies that found their footing in the
1990s—digital photography, 24/7 television news, and Internet-supported
citizen journalism—came of age that day as some two billion people (a
third of the species) watched the attacks unfold on TV and the World
Wide Web.
But what we couldn't foresee then is how the act of newsgathering
would be turned on its head. Since 9/11, the documentation of
conflict—in the form of still photographs and moving pictures, often by
civilians carrying camera-equipped mobile phones, whose footage can be
viewed almost instantaneously across the globe—actually takes precedent
in the public mind over context and analysis. Often, "traditional" media
coverage, no matter how well-funded, thorough and authoritative, is not
considered credible or definitive unless accompanied by compelling
visual evidence.
On Sept. 11, 2001, there was no such thing as a YouTube video. Or a
Facebook page. Or a Twitter feed. Cellphone cameras did not exist. Yet
legions of people rushed to the site of the twin towers to document the
attack and its aftermath. Their images, as much as those from stationary
TV cameras or professional photographers, became our window onto the
calamity. Meanwhile, countless others used their pagers, phones and PCs
to enter firsthand reports of what things were like in Lower Manhattan.
Thousands more, forwarding those accounts around the world, helped
produce a people's chronicle of 9/11 that corresponds with—rivals,
really—the record seen on television and in print.
What was extraordinary that day has become thoroughly familiar. In
2011, when history happens, it is more often than not a nonjournalist
with a pocket camera, a blog or a Twitter account who files the initial
dispatch. It was a tourist with a camcorder who captured the first
devastating waves of the Asian tsunami of 2004. A commuter with a mobile
phone, riding the London Underground, took the first haunting frames of
the transit bombings of 2005. Nowadays, history belongs to the first
photographer to post the pictures of it.
This phenomenon was everywhere apparent during this year's popular
"Arab Spring" uprisings, from Tunis to Tripoli, and from Aleppo to the
Gulf of Aden. In country after country, abuses were revealed via
Facebook postings and YouTube videos. Protests, coordinated via social
networks like Facebook, were spearheaded by young people, all of whom
had grown up during the digital era. (More recently, both rioters and
citizen-response groups in London and elsewhere have used mobile
messaging services to mobilize.)
In retrospect, one can only imagine how the assaults of 9/11 might
have been absorbed and magnified in the age of the smartphone, WiFi and
streaming video. How might the attacks have further traumatized us had
the technology existed to allow real-time visualizations of the deaths
of thousands of innocents? How differently might the international
community have reacted—or might historians have judged the actions of al
Qaeda—had workers, trapped inside the World Trade Center, used the
cameras on their hand-held devices and computers to record scenes of
atrocity and carnage, then beamed those photos and videos to their
families?
Instead of a panoramic view of mass murder, witnessed from a
distance, would we have seen individual lives extinguished one by one,
and irrefutably, in the here and now? And to what end? How, one wonders,
would we have handled such images, given the breadth of the horror and
the unspeakable depth of the loss?
It is hard to imagine that we would have wanted a more detailed
account of the awfulness of that day. Even so, it is hard to suppose
that we would rather have learned about the facts of September 11
through the next morning's newspapers. Ten years after, we don't just
expect a crowd-sourced profusion of digital images to accompany a
significant event as it unfolds; for better for worse, we demand it.
Mr. Friend, an editor at Vanity Fair, is the author
of "Watching the World Change: The Stories Behind the Images of 9/11,"
reissued this month by Picador. This op-ed is adapted from the book's
preface.
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