Tech and tragedy: Imagining 9/11 in the age of Twitter Twitter, print

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Tech and tragedy: Imagining 9/11 in the age of Twitter



When terrorists unleashed their lethal attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the first many people learned about them was when they turned on their televisions and saw the horrifying images of two planes slamming into New York’s Twin Towers.

People trapped inside the World Trade Center towers used their cellphones or email to contact friends and family; for many, the calls and messages conveyed their last words to loved ones.

Recordings and printed records have captured those moments but sharing with the outside world was much more limited than it is today.

Fast forward to the July tragedy in Norway where youth at the Labour Party’s summer camp were posting warnings and describing their ordeal even as Anders Breivik stalked them on Utoeya Island in a shooting rampage that would leave 69 dead. Others in the attacks used their social networks to let people know they were okay or to ask for help in finding people who were missing.

In Vancouver, Morten Rand-Hendriksen, who is from Norway, used Facebook to track down his friends who worked at the site of the bombing in Oslo that took place before the attack on the youth camp; within hours he had heard back from all of them. This March, after the massive earthquake and tsunami in Japan, Google used its crisis response page to publish quake-related resources, including a person finder which would be today’s digital equivalent of the posted lists of those missing after the Twin Towers collapsed.

At the time of the 9/11 attacks, people still turned to voice calls as their main means of communication and phone systems were overloaded, both by the huge surge in traffic and the infrastructure damage from the attack. Texting was available but limited compared to now, when hundreds of millions of text messages are exchanged each day. On the day of the attacks, some people were able to communicate through email and messages on their BlackBerries when voice lines failed.

But still it was difficult to get news of victims or survivors. If Facebook or Twitter had been around at the time, maybe Rachel Uchitel would have posted photos of her missing fiance who died at the World Trade Center. Instead, Uchitel, who went on to make headlines again in the Tiger Woods’ scandal, put up posters in the streets of New York while pictures of her clutching the posters flashed around the world in the mainstream media.

Looking back at how 9/11 played out compared to the coverage of events today, the information was scant. Neither onlookers nor the people involved as the tragedy unfolded had the resources to share as much as we do today.

If YouTube had been around in 2001 and smartphones as ubiquitous as they are now, would the world have been viewing firsthand footage of the terror and the courage of victims trapped in the towers? Would people have been conveying their final messages, not only in phone calls but in photos, videos and posts to their social networks, broadcasts that would capture those moments in a way no mainstream media could?

Technological changes that have occurred since 9/11, including the growth of social media, have not only transformed the way we communicate about events, in some cases — such as the recent political uprisings in Egypt — they have played a role in how events unfold.

“After big disasters, something like 9/11, you have a news vacuum. The journalists aren’t there yet, police and emergency services are giving different accounts,” said Alfred Hermida, associate professor at the University of B.C.’s School of Journalism and co-author of Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers. “All of a sudden social media will rush in to fill that vacuum.”

Although Facebook was still a few years away, YouTube wasn’t launched until 2005 and the first Tweets weren’t sent out until 2006, social media predates 9/11 in that people were blogging in 2001 and the early social network Six Degrees had approximately one million members.

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A fiery blasts rocks the World Trade Center September 11, 2001 in New York City.

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“The power of social media are you can mobilize your network,” said Hermida. “Through social media you connect to somebody in your network, they connect to somebody in their network and then it grows exponentially.”

Social media through mobile data also can provide a communications link when others are down.

Hermida points to the March earthquake in Japan, where in some cases voice service was out but people were able to communicate through data.

“You can imagine somebody might be caught in the rubble and they have a smart phone,” said Hermida. “Usually telephone networks are overloaded and you can’t call out, but you might be able to send a text or connect to a mobile network.”

While rescue workers sifting through the rubble of the Twin Towers could hear cellphones ringing and for days after wireless carriers monitored cell signals in the area in the hope of finding survivors, cellphones didn’t play a role in the rescue as they sometimes do today. For one thing, cellphones were not nearly as ubiquitous back then and data services, while available, weren’t in the hands of most users. Just over 100 million Americans had cellphones, not quite 40 per cent of the population. Today 96 per cent of Americans have wireless phones and by the end of this year, it is estimated that one in two Americans will own a smartphone.

The ramifications are huge for police and emergency services. They are using social networks for everything from enforcement — as in the case of the riots in Vancouver and Britain, where culprits have been identified on social media — to safety alerts.

For the Vancouver police department, social media has provided them with more than a million photos and 1,000 hours of video of the hockey riots — coverage that’s almost as extensive as the CCTV cameras used in the United Kingdom. So far nine people whose photos were among 40 posted online by the department have been identified.

Many of today’s smartphones are equipped with GPS and even for ones that aren’t, cellphone towers can provide an approximate location. Just this month the Calgary fire department found a man who became lost while floating on a dingy on the Bow River, locating him through the GPS on his phone. There are even apps for smartphones that signal your location in case you’re not able to check in.

The Victoria police department, an early adopter of social media, was convinced of its merits when six-year-old Jurian Vezerian, who went missing from Ecole Macaulay elementary was found safe thanks to the quick dissemination of news that he was missing. That was in the spring of 2010 and since then many other police forces, including Vancouver, have embraced social media.

In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission has announced it is updating its 911 emergency response system, including a plan to allow consumers to send texts, photos and videos to public safety answering points.

Hermida also points to the U.S. Geological Survey Twitter Earthquake Detector, a prototype system being developed by the USGS to track tweets about earthquakes.

The information is already available on social networks, but the challenge is in mining it in a useful way and filtering out the misinformation. While individual updates may not be verifiable, Hermida says the collective response can correct inaccuracies and so it is the larger picture that gives a better sense of what is happening.

“The real challenge here is not that this information isn’t available,” he said. “It is more how do you handle all this information. You are getting hundreds of tweets a minute and updates on Facebook, you have to figure out a way to mine that information.”

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But no one imagined social networks would become the powerful tool they are today.

“What was interesting with the 9/11 attacks, at the time of the attacks social media played a role in the dissemination of information,” said Hermida. “It was blogs, people were writing about their experiences, there were memorials on the blogs.

“Essentially what was happening was that people were using the technology available to them at the time and that was blogs.”

Bloggers were posting on many aspects of the attacks, from the simple ‘I’m okay’, to reassure family and friends if they were near the World Trade Center, to calls to action — like the blogger who urged people to donate blood.

Today, technology would allow for much more. Events are now relayed in real time, with not just stories but photos and videos.

News of the attacks in Norway, for example, surfaced first in social media networks, which traced the tragedy live as it unfolded.

As police, emergency services and journalists scrambled to react to the bombing in downtown Oslo, new tweets started coming from Utoeya, social media providing the early warning, well ahead of police and mainstream media.

“If we were to look at what would happen now with social media and mobile technologies we have two effects,” said Hermida. “One, they amplify. And, two, they help to mobilize. Imagine the amount of messages on Twitter that would be coming through about the event. Essentially news breaks first on Twitter, the first reports come from people directly affected by it.”

While “citizen journalism” has become a common phrase, people sharing on social media aren’t necessarily doing it because they want to be journalists. Many are just chronicling what is happening around them. For readers, it can offer an unfiltered, on-the-scene view, unlike the news reports on which they previously relied. Those reports may have contained first-hand accounts from people on the scene, but they were told through the filter of the news medium.

Hermida said chances are that people caught up in a disaster or major event aren’t thinking, “‘I’m a journalist, I want to tell the world.’ But they want to tell their friends, or to tell people they know this is what is happening.”

The power of social networks lies within easy reach.

People may share eyewitness accounts with those in their network — 100 Twitter followers, thousands or even tens of thousands — or with friends and family on Facebook.

Users may only want to reassure family they’re safe — or, as in the case of the intemperate posts in the Vancouver Stanley Cup riot or the recent riots in England, they may want to boast to friends about unlawful exploits.

But each person in an individual network has his or her own network, so posts can quickly spread far beyond one’s immediate circle of friends and family.