How would the Twitter generation have coped with 9/11? (PC Pro blogger)

This is another interesting article by the PC pro blogger Barry Collins.

Barry is thinking of Sept 11, 2001 and how technology today would change how we would have heard about such an event now. There were few camera phones around in 2001 and social networking at least on the scales of twitter and face book has not yet taken off. There were still bulletin boards and other internet forums you could log on to which did much the same things but these were perhaps not as mainstream as twitter and facebook. Barry missess this point slightly and suggests there was no comparable internet media source.

What Barry imagines is that the minute the plane hit the first tower the internet would be awash with photos, tweets and status updates about the attack. The rumours would fly around the internet until the truth was lost. As Barry points out the established news media struggled to keep up with the unfolding crisis and was full of rumours that day.

Barry goes onto point out there would be no censoring of the material went out. Everything would go out onto the internet. Could you imagine if someone had been streaming live onto the internet from inside the twin towers. Now imagine if 100's of people were doing it. I recently saw a documentary which included lots of personal video footage from outside the twin towers, from streets or apartments. These were very raw and emotional even 8 years on. I am not sure I can imagine the horror of watching footage of someone trying to get down the stairs in the twin towers hearing a rumble from above and then a few seconds of film before the signal breaks. There is footage from camera crews that were close in to the towers that are already quite shocking to watch. Do we need such emotional scars on our public psyche? Are we immune to events reports in this fashion? Would uncensored material actually cause emotional distress on a grander scale, in the future could people who were not even there suffer post traumatic stress could a similar attack paralyse the entire population. As the gap between reality and virtual reality decreases could it feel like we were actually in the middle of the crisis ourselves rather than just a spectator.

I remember the tube attacks in London in 2005. It started off with a news article about delays on the underground due to an electricity supply problem and went on from there. I followed the story on the urban 75 forums where people who had been caught up in it started posting. It was faster, personal and more raw than the mainstream news.

One of the problems with citizen media is that often people will take footage on their mobile phone and not help. I remember a few years back hearing about a horrific crash where a family was killed and the police not only had to deal with the accident but deal with motorists going the other way slowing down and using their mobile phones to get footage of the accident. Is there a legitimate reason to take such footage or have we turned into ghouls looking to get the most raw uncensored footage on the internet to get the highest views on you tube ever? Have we forgotten about the human lives destroyed?