102 Minutes that Changed America is the name of a documentary the History channel made about September 11th using lots of amateur and unaired footage. The clips are all edited in chronological order, and it follows what happened that morning, and people’s reactions to it. If you can, see it in its entirety. It is an incredibly moving piece, that I think does more justice to the event than anything else so far.
(Also worth noting, the September 11th Television Archive on archive.org)
But more than that, this got me thinking. In 2001, no one had a cameraphone. All of the video in this comes from people who had actual camcorders. If something like this had happened today, the amount of footage about such an event would be staggering. I imagine that it will get to a point where documentaries like this will be commonplace, and won’t take 7 years to compile. With user-generated content at the level it is right now, something like this could be edited in days, complimenting the thousands of hours of raw footage that would have already flooded YouTube et al.
Which got me thinking more. Earlier this year I read on Gizmodo an account of what happened in a gas station when a tornado touched down nearby. People whipped out their cellphones, and started recording. They recorded as the tornado headed straight for them, and kept recording to the point where it was definitely unsafe. I can imagine something similar happening in other large scale disasters, where instead of doing something, people observe. This isn’t a legitimate fear, because I think when it comes down to it, people will put their phones away and actually help other people. But it is a little scary that their first reaction is to capture the moment. I have a post about people’s desires to be the source of information – the person who broke the story. But I’ll let that be in its own post. It ties in nicely to this.
But it is absolutely incredible to imagine, if the attacks had happened today, 7 years later, how dramatically different the entire event would be. People inside the buildings would have posted blog posts or videos to YouTube from their phones; there would be hundreds of thousands of pictures and videos posted to the net by this time tonight. I think the technology gap between NYC and Indonesia is a big part of the lack of emotional response to the Boxing Day Tsunami three years later.
It is difficult to imagine, but odds are we’ll see it soon enough, and we’ll all be out in front, trying to get an exclusive.
