The Stupidity of The 9/11-Social Media What If?

When we think about September 11, it can be easy to forget just how long a period a decade is in the Internet age. In 2001, only half the country even used the Internet, a number that grew to around 77 percent by 2010. Dial-up access was still the only viable in-home option; AOL was still sending out CDs promising free hours of access.

The most famous social networks — Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, even Friendster — didn’t exist in 2001. That’s a pretty jarring thought when you imagine just how much of our news, both personal and societal, is now delivered to us through those networks.

It’d be idiotic to try to look back at the terrorist attacks on 9/11 and say “Having Twitter would have saved lives” or something to that effect. One could say there’s value in having more information in an attack or disaster, and that’s true to a point. But could Facebook have added anything worthwhile to the people stuck in the World Trade Center who already had cell phones, land lines and word-of-mouth saying to both stay and escape? Who in the Pentagon or Flight 93 would have had access to MySpace or time to use it? This is a case where hindsight isn’t 20/20.

Instead, let’s examine some of the social networks that have appeared in the past decade to try to see how they’ve changed our exchange of information that’s a little more important than just cat pictures.

The modern model for social networking sites — having profiles, friend lists and various messaging/wall features — was probably first put together with SixDegrees.com in 1997. As a break away from chat rooms, message boards and various other forms on Internet groups, SixDegrees was a success. It built a user base millions strong. But by 2000 it was dead. Its founder later said it was simply ahead of its time. That may or may not be the cause of its downfall, but it did prove the model had value.

Friendster launched in 2002. Initially it supposed to be a rival dating site (which our purposes don’t matter) to Match.com, but its key feature was that it attempted to set people up with friends of friends. That kind of intranetwork connecting follows most closely what we think of in terms of social media today: following people with a degree or two of separation.

One group that really pushed Friendster in the early years were bloggers. While a blogs could cover just about any damn thing, it did help ingrain independent, personal and regional reporting into social media. That’s a huge departure from the past, in which it could be nearly impossible for someone to get their news out without having access to a major media outlet.

It’d be hard to overstate how much having independent platforms, like blogs, and social networks to spread them has changed the way we get our news. It’d take essays and essays and probably a degree or two. It’s pushed the news cycle faster and faster, which means that in terms of a natural disaster or terrorist attack we get information coming to us much more quickly.

Of course, there’s the fact that having tons of information and reporting coming in means nothing if none of it’s any good. It’s probably being a bit harsh, because it’s an issue in any network, but no social site has been as notorious for having a dearth of quality info and connections as MySpace. To be fair, when MySpace launched in 2003, that probably wasn’t the point.

During its rise, MySpace was the pinnacle of the early social media model that might best be described as chat rooms with personal profiles. Its user base was mostly focused on sprucing their pages up with horrifying HTML coding in order to collect more friends and join random groups for semi-directed talk with strangers. If anything, the site’s rise and fall shows the shift that’s happened over the past 10 years: social media going from being a diversion to essential.

Also launched in 2003, LinkedIn was one of the first (and most successful) network designed for professional. It can also be argued that LinkedIn would have had value following the September 11 attacks. Remember that majority of space in the WTC towers was dedicated to offices for professionals.

In one widely-cited example, financial firm Cantor Fitzgerald occupied the 101st to the 105th floors of the north tower. Every employee in Cantor’s offices, 658 of 960 in New York, died on 9/11. Yet CEO Howard Lutnick refused to let the firm collapse, and has estimated that he hired 10 people a week for the first year after the attack. For a top firm, that’s an unfathomable rate, especially before LinkedIn. Cantor’s story isn’t unique, and while its impossible to say that LinkedIn would have helped keep some firms afloat after 9/11, it certainly has made hiring managers’ jobs easier since.

It’s hard to imagine that Facebook only launched seven years ago considering how pervasive it’s become in so many people’s lives. It’s grown from being The Facebook, a MySpace analog with a whole lot of privacy for college kids to an overwhelming conglomeration of millions of people’s personal and public lives.
For all its issues, Facebook has consistently been on the forefront of new changes to how we share information and news online. The small single-college networks it was originally limited to helped build popularity for the concept of not only sharing but promoting and editorializing everything online. Spread across the massive, open Facebook of today, that means you’re going both find out about events and local news worldwide (assuming you can cut through all the crap).

In terms of a disaster, Facebook’s value lies in being able to quickly and efficiently connect with the most important parts of your network; i.e. your family and close friends. On the other hand, judging from the amount of fluff, misinformation and downright idiocy that floods anyone’s News Feed, Facebook isn’t always the best source to find the nitty-gritty on what kind of bad shit is going down.

Twitter’s only been around since 2006, and already its the go-to source for timely updates on just about anything. It’s such a successful platform that both Facebook and Google+ (which I’m not going to waste time talking about) have made microblogging integral parts of their interface.

It’s an interesting beast though. There’s no doubt that Twitter breaks the news these days. It’s simply faster to get 140 character bursts out there than writing a full story for a news site. At the same time, as evidenced by recent earthquakes and Hurricane Irene, millions of tweets an hour stating “OMG EARTHQUAKE” aren’t really adding anything useful to your own personal knowledge of how severe things are or what to do.

And that’s the problem with arguing that social media could have helped on September 11, or during any other attack or disaster. There’s definitely value in having a constant stream of quality information coming in. But, ignoring the whole issue of access, there’s a problem of actually filtering out the noise. Imagine what Facebook and Twitter feeds would have been like on September 11: for every person with relevant knowledge or valuable updates, there would have been thousands upon thousands of people spewing their fears, anger and concerns. In the moment, who’s actually going to wade through all that?

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