Technology has always seemed a mixed blessing to me. One of its chief results (if not aims) in the past few hundred years has been to devise new and more efficient ways to kill people. And clever killers have even found out how to use ordinary things to cause extraordinary carnage. Witness the fertilizer bombs used in the Oklahoma City bombing, and now, the use of passenger jets to destroy the World Trade Center. This is deeply disturbing and fascinating at the same time. Human beings have an incredible capacity to invent, and yet they also have an incredible capacity to do harm.
I was feeling this incredible ambivalence about technology in the days following the World Trade Center events when I realized something else: that average people had used technology in new ways to communicate with those who loved them. When the damage caused by the collapse of the buildings crippled New York's transportation and communication systems, people relied more than ever on newer forms of communication. Stories of people on the hijacked airliners or trapped in the office towers calling their loved ones on cellular phones were incredibly moving. My thought was that even if the end result was tragic, it was a gift for these people to be able to speak with those who loved them.
My own experiences surrounding September 11 are indicative of how people have begun to use technology in a quest to connect more tightly with friends and family. Immediately after hearing about the plane crashes, I logged on (with several million others) to CNN.com, and kept that window open all day. My other concern was checking on the safety of several acquaintances in the city. By logging onto their weblogs, I discovered that all were safe.
But in a fascinating and entirely new phenomenon, I was able to use their weblogs to observe several first-hand eyewitness accounts of the events that would never be shown on the evening news. This first-person coverage was completely subjective, emotional, and therefore incredibly compelling. These were people I had come to know through their writing, and now their writing had become a window into the tragedy from an eyewitness perspective.
On September 11, Anil Dash wrote,
Jason Levine, who is a pediatric resident, appealed for blood donations:
The next day found him counting his blessings:
Some of the most eloquent writing about the tragedy came from Jeffrey Zeldman, whose weblog contained only this short update on the day of the tragedy: "A tragedy of untold proportions is going on around us. We are going to pray and give blood." A few days later, he began posting a series of pieces to his "My Glamorous Life" section, the first of which (<911>) contained the following:
In their own ways, these New Yorkers used technology (in this case, weblogs) to not only inform friends and neighbours about their safety, but to actually begin working through the tragedy for themselves. By bearing witness not only to events, but to their own anguish, they are using new tools to fulfil our basic human need for connection. Being able to check in with some of these people, hour by hour, made me grateful for the technology that we sometimes accuse of being "dehumanizing." I am mindful of the fact, though, that many of these acquaintances and friends would be unknown to me without this same technology. Clearly, Marshall McLuhan's description of the world as a "global village" has never been more true. Our friends, as well as our enemies, now have a global reach. How we use our tools has never been more important.