Terror and the Web Part 4
- Ten years after 9/11
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Terror and the Web Part 1
- September 2001 <<
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Terror
and the Web Part 3 - September 2002
September 7th 2011
Where were you when you found out about the 9/11
attacks? It's a pertinent question nearly 10 years
on from the events of 9/11. Like many other people,
I was in an office trying to get news sites - any
news site - to load properly and tell me what was going
on. In the end, the early twenty-first technology failed
to do the job and we ended up trying to find TV sets
and radios to see what was happening in New York and
Washington on that fateful day.
Things have change a lot since then - but some things
haven't. This article does not try to address ten years
of technological change though, it is merely a reflection
of then and now.
One: the collapsing web
Almost every single news site collapsed under the
massive upsurge in traffic on 9/11. The BBC, CNN and
just about every major international news source simply
stopped working altogether. Streaming media was in its
infancy then, and it didn't stand a chance. News providers
struggled to reconfigure their sites to reduce load,
and eventually mainstream news sites came back online.
The web looked very different then, as this
archive reveals, and the technology underpinning
the web was primitive by today's standards. Now we have
load balancing, clouds, mirror sites and the like..
so surely it could never happen again? It turns out
that the web is not as resilient as you think, and when
Norway was hit by terror
attacks in 2011 almost all Norwegian news sites
collapsed in exactly the same way as global sites collapsed
on 9/11.
But it wasn't just news sites that couldn't cope.
The huge demands placed on the internet had a knock-on
effect on other traffic too, many ISPs struggled to
keep up with user demand and even basic tools such as
email suffered a severe slow down. And WTC was more
than just an office block - a significant amount of
internet infrastructure routed through the building,
leading to significant data tranmission problems all
along the East Coast.
Two: television and radio
Back in 2001, streaming media on the internet was
a hit-and-miss affair at the best of times. The fallback
was to watch it on TV, but that wasn't as simple as
you might think. Assuming that you were in an office
trying to keep up with the events of 9/11, the best
was of doing it would be to turn on a television set.
These were much more common in offices 10 years ago
than now, often attached to VCRs for presentations and
long since replaced by projectors and big flat panel
monitors. The trouble then was that most TVs lacked
an antenna, so people had to improvise with whatever
bits of wire they could find to get a signal. The results
were not impressive. Radios worked better, but they
were pretty uncommon in a work environment even then,
and of course you couldn't see what was going
on.
Ten years on and you would be hard pressed to find
a TV set in most modern offices. In many areas digital
TV has completely replaced analogue TV, so it would
be pointless trying to rig up an old set anyway. Conversely,
FM radios are now pretty common in mobile phones, but
that's hardly a communal experience. In many ways we
are more reliant on the internet for news than ever
before, and if a disaster on the scale of 9/11 happened
again, would we be able to cope.
One twist was that the World Trade Center in New
York was also the main TV and radio transmission base
for a great deal of the city. When the WTC collapsed,
New Yorkers were left in the dark as to what was going
on in their own city. If you've ever seen the movie
Cloverfield
(also set in New York) then you might just understand
what it must have been like in the city at the time,
with massive destruction happening but no way of getting
the full picture of unfolding events.
Three: no Twitter or YouTube
These days revolutions are relayed on Twitter and
are document on YouTube. Back in 2001 neither service
existed. But is that a good or bad thing?
Despite the damage inflicted on the World Trade Center
and the inevitable overloading of mobile phone networks
that happens after a major disaster, we know that many
people trapped in the WTC managed to communicate with
loved ones or left chilling and deeply sad messages
on answering machines. In these days of instant tweets
and direct video uploads from phones to YouTube and
other services, it would be likely that we would have
a huge amount more first hand accounts.. assuming that
mobile phone and computer networks had not collapsed
completely. But would that be better? I personally
think it would be too much for any observer to bear.
But something unusual happened on 9/11 when it came
to sharing information and even eyewitness reports.
Because news sites were down, just about any online
community at all became a hub for sharing information.
Slashdot
still carries it's 9/11 news article with the comments
intact, even the Paint
Shop Pro Usenet group became a news source of sorts.
Probably these days it would be a Facebook page or a
Twitter hashtag instead.
What if it happened today?
What if these attacks happened today? Our increasing
reliance on the web for news and the changing tides
of technology mean that we could be seriously out of
touch if an incident of this scale ever happened again.
How could you cope with no web and no TV? If the power
went out, do you have a battery powered radio? Can you
pick up anything other than FM in case your local radio
stations go out? Despite a decade of terrorist attacks
following 9/11, in some ways we seem more vulnerable
than ever before.
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Terror and the Web Part 1
- September 2001 <<
Terror and the Web Part 2 - December 2001 <<
Terror
and the Web Part 3 - September 2002
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