July 19, 2007
Disaster and Technology Posted by Ellen Feldman at 10:50 PM EST Years ago when I was a student beginning to care about history, a teacher’s remark about the Titanic set me thinking about technology. Just as the ship was seen as an emblem of modernity, so the speed with which the news of its sinking traveled was another hallmark of the modern world. Had ocean liner and iceberg met in an earlier era, it would have taken weeks for the news to spread. Other examples of technology coloring the way we perceive and react to events abound. When television brought the violence of the civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam into American living rooms, Americans left the comfort of those living rooms to take to the streets. Yesterday’s steam explosion in midtown Manhattan set me brooding about the connection between technology and disaster again. I was about to leave the New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street when I looked out of one of the tall windows of the main hall and saw a plume of what I thought was smoke rising to the east. A short time earlier I had heard rumblings which I took to be thunder, but when I emerged from the windowless Rare Book Room and saw that the sun was out, I assumed that the storm had been brief or my ears had deceived me. Now the low rumbling that accompanied the geyser shooting skyward indicated that I had in fact heard something, but it had not been thunder. The great hall of the library was filled with readers, researchers, and tourists. Since the library’s glorious restoration, it is common to see gaggles of out-of-towners wandering the halls and reading rooms with necks craned and cameras aimed. But at 6 p.m. on July 18, every eye and lens (I’ll get to the latter later) was focused on the sight outside the building. The plume of what we now know was steam continued to rise, obscuring the skyscrapers beyond. And now hundreds of people were running toward the library, some of them covered with mud and other debris, many crying. No one spoke the words 9/11, but I doubt a soul in that hall was not thinking them. The reaction was not surprising, but what followed was. One after another, people began taking out their cell phones. I am not an admirer of the gadgets. I find them annoying on buses and sidewalks and in shops and restaurants. I find them unconscionable in libraries. (My husband tells me I have turned one reading room I frequent into a fascist state in my zeal to stamp the things out.) But I was grateful for them at that moment. While some people could not get through, others managed to make contact. Within minutes, the word had gone around. We were witnessing not a terrorist attack, but a steam pipe explosion. Even the official information came by way of cell phone. One guard on duty called his wife who turned on the television and reported what was happening back to us who were on the scene. I left the library through the 42nd Street entrance, as directed by the guards, and joined what was now a crowd of thousands moving west. There was no panic. There were no rumors. Everyone was telling everyone else that, despite the morning’s news of a just-released intelligence report predicting another attack on American soil, this was instead an urban accident due to aging infrastructure. And many were talking into their cell phones reporting to friends and families that they were unhurt. The ability to communicate during that nervous time was a boon, but there was another aspect of those cell phones I found more perplexing. Inside the library, people were crowding the windows to take pictures of the disaster. Outside on the street, they were stopping to capture the scene digitally. I assumed they were all fledgling photojournalists, dreaming of breaking into the big time with their pictures. A neighbor whom I ran into on the long trek home interpreted the picture-taking differently. She says we have turned into a nation of individuals who can experience events only vicariously. Perhaps that’s another result of technological innovation.
| 
