In the immediate aftermath of the July bombings in London, millions of people went online to seek infor- mation, analysis, discussion and witness accounts. Victims sent images snapped with mobile phones straight to the BBC. The government rushed out advice on its website dedicated to civil emergencies (www.pfe.gov.uk). None of this would have happened but for New York’s tragedy four years ago today, and the subsequent war on terror.
The online reactions to London’s 7/7, with a slew of instantly posted photographs and websites, showed vividly that a tipping point had been reached, and passed, in the way we view and handle the new digital media. The atrocities inflicted on America in 2001 didn’t create the web’s capacity for propa-ganda, citizen journalism, political association and terrorist abuse, but they did incite huge numbers of previously apathetic individuals to start realising its potential — the whole awful episode being comprehensively documented at www.911digitalarchive.org. War, as always, has driven the adoption of new technology.
In 1884, Hiram Maxim invented the machinegun. This oddball visionary predicted that it would change the nature of conflict, but the world did not learn what the machinegun meant until it became the definitive weapon of the first world war, turning swathes of Europe into a trench-filled killing ground.
It was, in military jargon, a “force multiplier”, putting the power to kill many into a single soldier’s hands. In the current battle for hearts and minds, the same term could also describe the web — a technology that enables individuals to convey their views directly to millions.
NEW WAYS OF DELIVERING NEWS
William Russell’s telegraphed dispatches to The Times from the Crimea, television reports from frontline Vietnam, CNN’s 24-hour coverage of Operation Desert Storm — in each case, civilians were informed about a war with what seemed unprecedented immediacy, and each advance changed the way the public perceived conflict. Newseum, the thoughtful interactive museum of news, describes the history of war reporting at www.newseum.org/warstories, and explains that, in Kosovo during 1999, the Institute for War & Peace Reporting (www.iwpr.net) solicited contributions from ordinary citizens who vividly described being caught up in ethnic cleansing.
For all this, however, 9/11 became a defining moment because millions made the web their first port of call for news. The BBC website was one of many surprised by the demand, which has had one notable consequence: when the inevitable happened on 7/7, external overflow servers were in place to handle extra traffic. In London, the Metropolitan Police was also experimenting with a message broadcast system that today delivers security alerts by text and e-mail through www.police.uk/services/mb.
Christopher Kelly, an internet analyst at Forrester Research, explains that “every time an event like this happens, people are motivated to try the web”. When America went to war with Iraq in 2003, CNN’s website saw a 30% jump in weekly visits. Furthermore, recorded streams enable us watch events at our own convenience. Charlene Li, another Forrester analyst, points out that the downloading of MSNBC news streams increased sevenfold after the invasion of Iraq, and describes the war as “the latest — and most powerful — development in a confluence of events that have popularised broadband”.
THE RISE OF THE CITIZEN JOURNALIST
Danah Boyd, a researcher for Yahoo!, maintains that online reaction to the July bombings was another landmark in the news revolution. If 9/11 showed the web to be a ready resource, by 7/7 it was the instinctive destination. In her blog (www.zephoria.org), Boyd explains that we no longer want the tradition of “packaged reports of terror on autorepeat”. Instead, we want details and real stories from real people, which can be found in plenty at www.technorati.com, the blog search engine that listed 1,300 posts about the London bombs by 10.15am, and saw a 45% increase in hits that morning; at www.flickr.com, where the photo-blog community posted pictures from the scene with breathtaking speed; and on the collaborative encyclopedia Wiki-pedia (en.wikipedia.org), where instant historians were writing their version of events.
Carlo Carrington was in one of the bombed Tube trains. Interviewed later, he told Sky News he had thought he was going to die, “and didn’t want to”. When it started to look as if he would escape, he began to film his surroundings. Like those who posted pictures and text, his instinctive reaction to the crisis was that he could record and distribute his version of the drama: “I wanted to give people an insight into what conditions were actually like under there.” The specifics were not new — the old media are increasingly eager to co-opt the voices of “real” people — but 7/7, when the BBC received dozens of photographs within hours, saw all these factors crystallise under the immense pressure of a huge news story. Web news grew up on 9/11. On 7/7, so did citizen journalism.
ALTERNATIVE VIEWPOINTS
In the wake of 9/11, people were stung into learning about their enemy as never before; stung into seeking to understand alternative points of view. The web was the obvious medium, and during the Iraq war Al Jazeera briefly became the leading request on the search engine Lycos. Although this was partly because the Arab news website (english.aljazeera.net) chose to show pictures of dead Americans, it has become a mecca for westerners trying to understand how relatively moderate Arabs are thinking. Its reports on the Palestinian occupation and on Taysir Alluni, an Al Jazeera journalist who has been in and out of Spanish prisons, make for genuinely uncomfort-able reading.
