2009-09-11 What Would 9-11 Be Like in the Age of Social Media

2009-09-11 Alexia Tsotsis LA Weekly \9-11\citizen empowerment\blogosphere http://blogs.laweekly.com/style_council/tech/what-would-9-11-be-like-in-the/ What Would 9-11 Be Like in the Age of Social Media? What Would 9-11 Be Like in the Age of Social Media  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?" ... A look into the net reaction to more recent disasters offers some clues into what would happen in a 9/11-style attack today. Would Twitter be able to handle the scale? Would we all switch to Facebook? Even if overwhelmed, there's no doubt our real-time communication platforms would provide crucial information on survivors and those looking for loved ones, as Craigslist did after Hurricane Katrina.

Proto-blogger Dave Winer, who quite notably turned his Scripting blog into an outpost for 9-11 related information, made this prediction, in 2001.

Someday soon every home will have a weblog, and we'll have great aggregation tools that allow us to quickly assemble lists of loved ones who survived. A new button on cellphones that says "I made it" and it flows the fact to all your concerned friends. Here is how things would be different had the 9-11 planes been hijacked in 2009 instead of 2001. ''For what it's worth, I spent most of the day of 9/11 driving from Georgia to North Carolina on I-85, with Harena sending emails from her Palm VIIx PDA using an early implementation of wireless internet. We later heard that other people had not been able to get through to loved ones for many hours, but we were able to verify pretty quickly that a NYC-resident family member was okay. This was before cellphones suddenly became ubiquitous a year or two later. -''

&ldquo;Here is how things would be different had the 9-11 planes been hijacked in 2009 instead of 2001.&rdquo;   