A Tale of Two Media:Tragedy and Images

Pearl Street, Lower Manhattan -- Tuesday morning definitely marked the passage from one time to another. The Information Age is defined by images, not e-mail, and your kids and others will be asking you all of your lives where you were when the plane crashed into the World Trade Center and burst into that orange fireball and the buildings fell down. I can't help but think that this was the day when computer animation became reality. One of the most striking things about this story is the marked evolution of two media -- online and off. Politicians and pundits own the second, individual humans the first. It was odd how cool and natural all of the reporters and anchors were. Everybody said they were shocked, but nobody seemed to be. There was a lot of grave talk about how things will change forever, but most of the coverage was curiously remote and detached. Thanks to some local cops and firemen from my town, I just got to within a couple blocks of what the volunteers call "Ground Zero" -- the shockingly small pile of rubble that is all that is left of two of the biggest buildings on the planet. It's the perfect place to write about how the media -- new and old -- handled this story.(more)

For me, the images down here will be the barges that chugged out of Battery Park carrying corpses bound for vast New Jersey morgues, the smoke and smell and noise, the gaunt and hollow-eyed looks of the cops and firemen digging desperately for their buddies with their bare hands, the relatives on their knees praying all over the place, the video of the couple jumping off one of the towers holding hands, crushed police cars and fire trucks, many with bodies inside, the distant figure on the water everybody said was the U.S.S. George Washington, an aircraft carrier sent to protect New York harbor, and the soldiers with machine guns that are guarding major roadways and airports.

Big stories like this now are covered two ways -- online and off. The former draws millions to websites like CNN's and USA Today's, and new kind of sites like this one. Bloggers and others put up sites so that people could describe what was happening in their own words. People in apartment complexes and news sites posted accounts, and looked for relatives and housing.

As interesting as the Net is -- some of the best and most graphic video of the tragedy was popping up all over the Web -- and as idiosyncratic, the dominant medium when stuff like this happens is still TV, by a wide margin. Hour by hour, TV culls and culls until it finds a handful of quickly familiar images burned into our national and global consciousness. In our time, somebody has a videocam aimed at everything all the time, and within minutes the pictures show up everywhere, on television and the Net. Almost nothing is our culture goes unrecorded or unobserved any longer. The immediacy was as astonishing as the images were unbelievable.

By nightfall, CNN, MSNBC and the networks were moving away from the dramatic video and the indescribable scenes of wreckage and carnage and calling in the policy wonks and propellerheads who hide out in Washington caves until something like this happens. The focal point of all the airtime then shifted from the devastation in New York to the parsing and analyzing of the political, governmental and intelligence communities. For future reference, that may be a good time to turn off the tube and get online, the medium of individual stories, feelings and experiences.

When things like this happen, TV, much more than the Net or the Web, reveals whether leaders rise or fall to the occasion. Mayor Guiliani of New York clearly rose to the tragedy. President Bush, sticking to his cautious sing-song monotone, fled to various bunkers and seemed to shrink throughout the day. Guiliani got bigger by the hour. Defying advice that he hide out until the shooting stopped, he rushed to the scene, was nearly killed, calmed the city down and took charge of the clean-up and rescue. Bush got on his best suit and stuck to the prompter. At least that was the image that TV brought of us of these two very different leaders.

If you love New York, your heart will break when the smoke clears. Something about the city is busted for good, no matter what the mayor says. The damage is not describable, and surely hasn't been captured on TV. There are dead firemen, cops and office workers all over the rubble, everybody is saying, and the dust is so thick even the cadaver dogs are getting sick. Five techs with thermal imaging probes were retreating uptown, their sensitive equipment almost useless in the mud (caused by water poured on the still-burning fires) and smoke and dirt.

The buzz from the cops and reporters standing around is that the death toll will be horrible -- between two and three thousand -- but nowhere near the much higher figures feared yesterday. It seems that many people did get out, calling wives and cops from their cell phones as they went, as did some of the doomed passengers on the hijacked planes. (And a number of the people buried under the towers are still calling for help on their cells. Others got calls from spouses and friends telling them to get out.)

Across the street, a group of structural engineers were reassuring reporters that the towers collapsed of their own structural weakness, the steel melting from the fires, the buildings designed to collapse inward -- rather than fall down -- to save lives.

With their usual hubris, reporters and politicians were promising us that everything was going to change. But if the attacks demonstrate nothing else, it is the folly of that kind of thinking. Terrorists change too, and for all the high-tech equipment pouring into Manhattan, sometimes there isn't a thing we can do to stop them.

Comments

Re:Middle East Wire -- Interesting

[Anthony Boyd]

I agree with your criticism of the original post, Reality Master. And I would add an additional criticism: the terrorists have not stood up and said why they did what they did. So the original post that Reality Master replied to, and it's original article, are either guessing, or inferring, or else it was written by the terrorists. In which case, I suspect that the FBI will be knocking on slashdot's door pretty soon.

Since I don't believe that the article was written by the terrorists -- it certainly isn't portrayed that way -- I'm left thinking it's just guesswork, which I reject, or else they inferred it based upon current information. If that's the case, every person on slashdot is equally qualified to state why it was done, based upon current information. It's entirely up to each person's interpretation. And in that case, my interpretation is that these are terrorists, these are evil people who are willing to sacrifice innocent people. There is no higher cause at work here. They are petty, self-absorbed people who are willing to sacrifice and sell-out their own people and other innocent people for an unstated message that I would reject even if it were stated. I give no forum to murderers.

Cell phones: Our Savior?

[ZaBu911]

Over the past few months, I've been wondering whether I should or should not buy a cell phone. The FCC issued warning about cell phones causing brain cancer, but since that only applies to people using the phones for more than an hour a day, I decided to cave in and buy one. When I first heard about this crisis, I thought about how horrible it might be to be trapped under a bunch of rubble. That's when my cell phone went off, and my friend from back east asked me if everything was okay out here in California. Then it hit me...if only everyone in the building had a cell phone! Hundreds, if not thousands, of lives would have been saved. Fortunately, since these devices are nearly ubiquitous, many people escaped death. Another blow for Nokia. Imagine their next advertising gimmick: "Buy our new 6100 phone. It could save your life.. [display picture of person lying dead in bomb rubbel, and picture of live person holding up phone hugging their family members] yuck. - Z;(Bu911

Perhaps, but...

[sheldon]

I am not a supporter of President Bush, and I don't wish to push forward a political agenda.

But as much as I don't like the guy, I've got to say I did not find it at all reassuring to not hear much from him, or his advisors even.

I think during the entire day Tuesday I saw him twice. Once in the morning, once at night.

The only other person I saw from his administration was Karen Hughes.

I guess the point is, it scared me as an American. From talking to others at work, many feel the same way both Democrats and Republicans.

That's not to say I don't think he might be appropriately handling it. I've got to say if there is one man I would want as Secretary of State right now it's General Powell.

I want to see my leaders, it's important to me and it's disappointing that I saw far too much of him pushing his agenda of tax cuts and national missile defense, and now I don't see enough.

My Australian Perspective.

[eye.likeJava()]

Having worked overseas I can understand how unimportant Australia is and how far we are away from the rest of the word so before you all trivialise my comments I would like to say is that a lot of Australians have sat up till 3 and 4 am (AEST) watching the coverage from CNN and abc. We care, we are hopping mad! A lot of Australians will loose friends and love ones over this. And today our government will debate enabling the ANZUS treaty which will put our country very close to a war footing.

Right will overcome these maniacs and their supporters..

God save the Queen and God bless America!

Re:Middle East Wire -- Interesting

[lazychink]

What is said here is true. Please, please fellow Slashdot readers do not let the American media blind you. There is NO EXCUSE for the atrocities commited in New York, but there is also NO EXCUSE for what the Palestinians to through on a daily basis. What we have there is systematic genocide by the Zionist government against the native peoples there that goes completly unreported!

Re:Katz your dumb.

[jgerman]

Katz is an ass, and so are the people who, in this time of tragedy, join him in pointing fingers in judgment. But you are going a little too far. Guliani did what he thought was best and should be commended. It was not to show off any more that Bush's actions were an indication of hiding. These men and hundreds of thousands of others, be they rescue workers or government decision makers did what they felt was the most beneficial thing that they could do at the time.

This is not a time to point fingers at ourselves, I was disgusted last night watching some asshole rip into one person after another who could be connected with this act, from airport officials to intelligence agency members.

Re:The Empire State Building

[dodald]

I also agree with the posters above me, You my friends (LinuxLudite, [amorphis], and Reality Master 101) are fucking idiots
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