Never have 9 years and yesterday collided so seamlessly as they do today- recalling the morning of September 11th, 2001. The story, first delivered publicly, was outlined by the words of news reporters, colored in by shaken witnesses and brought to life by cell phone, local surveillance, news, and citizen-owned camera footage. Live TV updates kept the nation on edge hour after consecutive hour, with replay after replay of the most obscene act of cruelty most of us had ever witnessed that close to home. We watched the stories cautiously retold and re-angled on the nightly news then again on morning shows and everything in between for months.
A year later, the memory of this day came vindicated in books, chronicled in documentaries, honored with memoirs and collectible debris, mail-order commemoratives, TV specials, cable network dramas, and internet exclusives. The destruction was cleared as we began to rebuild and the way we remembered 9/11 would dramatically change.
Taking shape on the same time line, the digital web began serving as an archive to all things 9/11. Web apps brought digital, broadcast, and social content together to retrace and relive attacks from the cockpits of hijacked planes, traffic control towers and inside of the towers themselves. Digital infographics and “Streaming Culture” gave victims, hijackers and Air Traffic Control a voice. The events of 9/11 were retold by conspiracy theorists on YouTube, digital tributes to victims and digitally animated 3D dissertations giving the quiet fall of Tower 7 a voice.
Our own collective intelligence can be credited to the ideation of sites like Wikileaks.org- a game changer with the public leak of 9/11 Pager Data sent and received between Government and Military officials during the attacks. We were crowd-sourced for, what was once irrelevant, homemade videos that would eventually become the YouTube we know so well today.
With the vast variety of web apps, archived data, user generated media content, blogs, articles, forums, chat, comment threads, and open source contributions we can digitally relive every defining moment of that day together; and that we do. And because we do, we will continue to create, contribute, and demand more digital content–bigger and better digital content.
Whether we’re mourning, moving on or lingering somewhere between the two, the digital web is what we want when we want it; a collaboration of individual experiences that collectively have allowed us to mourn, inform, move on or learn more about the attacks on 9/11. The digital web is led by human compass. It is a unique and interactive, informative and readily available, provocatively human experience that can bring yesterday and 9 years together seamlessly.
Lindsay is a Community Manager for Nissan Altima, working in Chicago.
