Most of America woke up this morning desperately hoping yesterday's events were just a bad dream. It wasn't. The images we saw and the sounds we heard were real and that reality will forever haunt
our memories. Now we must raise a flag, just like those three firefighters did in the World Trade Center rubble, and try to move on.
It will be hard. The airwaves are, and will continue to be,
full of terror coverage. So are the print pages and the web. And predictably, everyone is praising the web, specifically email and instant messengers, for connecting people yesterday when the
phones went silent.
Thinking back on yesterday, I realize that connecting people is the web's one and only accomplishment yesterday, and that's a shame.
Driving to work yesterday morning,
a DJ on an FM station I was listening to, broke in with a special report about a plane crashing into one of the twin towers. I switched to AM and quickly found out about the second plane live on
the air and heard President Bush say the dreaded word - "terrorists." Running into the office a few minutes later, I tried to log on to CNN, MSNBC and FOX websites, but the sites were so slow they
were virtually useless.
I wasn't the only one. The entire office was trying to find out what happened. So what did the technology and computer- savvy MediaPost staff do? We crowded into the
office of the president of the company who happened to have an ancient wooden radio on his bookshelf and breathlessly listened, staring in disbelief at the faded brown grid of the Sony speaker, as
WCBS anchors reported on one unthinkable event after another as they happened.
We followed the whole story the same way we would have followed it in 1941 - on the radio. Later in the day, the
major news websites were still too slow even after having stripped off almost all ads and graphics. We later found the illustrations of the horrific events on the website of Time magazine - the
same magazine people turned to in 1941. The web failed us, its biggest proponents.
September 11, 2001 saw an unprecedented catastrophe. We will never understand why it happened or "feel better"
about any of it. But we do have to rebuild our country and one of the items of the list should be building a web that will not only help people find their loved ones when phones don't work, but a
web that lives up to its original promise of providing round-the-clock information to all who want it.