July 20, 2007
Disaster and Technology II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:45 AM EST I was not in New York when the steam pipe exploded. I was in the Denver airport, waiting for a plane that was two hours late, and saw it live on CNN. That’s about as close as I care to come to such an event, thank you very much. If that means living vicariously, so be it. Ellen Feldman mentions that news of the Titanic disaster spread around the world in hours thanks to the technological miracles of submarine cables and wireless, and that a few decades earlier it would have taken weeks for the news to spread. Indeed. In January, 1856, the Collins liner Pacific, sailing from Liverpool to New York, simply vanished. No trace of her or any of the 280 souls on board ever appeared. It is unlikely we will ever know what happened. Ms. Feldman mentions the heavy use of cell phones, both as communication devices and as cameras, and I agree with her that they are often obnoxious when used in the wrong place or too loudly. (In the Denver airport I watched in fascination as a man, oblivious to his surroundings, carried on an animated conversation—complete with emphatic hand gestures—with an unseen interlocutor, using a hands-free cell phone. Twenty-five years ago such a scene would have brought the security guards and probably men in white coats.) But the proliferation of cell phones and camcorders has produced a revolution in the amount of evidence regarding historical events that can be utilized. The first time a tornado was photographed was in 1884, and it was, I believe, the 1950s before one was caught on movie film. Today you can buy dozens of DVDs of tornado movies. I’ve seen some that are very impressive to put it mildly. One was shot from the entrance to a storm cellar, with the man’s wife screaming at him in the background to stop filming and close the door. The famous Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination is, so far as I know, the only one, and by far the most important piece of evidence regarding exactly what happened. But when 9/11 happened, 38 years later, things were different. There is only one piece of film footage of the first plane striking the north tower. It was shot by a French film crew who were doing a piece on New York City firemen and just happened to be filming them while facing south on Greenwich Street—the World Trade Center in the background—when history happened before their astonished eyes. But there are dozens if not hundreds of views of the second plane hitting the south tower, taken from every conceivable vantage point, and there’s an almost infinite amount of film of the immediate aftermath, the desperate rescue attempts, and the fall of the towers. Ms Feldman writes, “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.” I don’t agree. Our species is the most communicative on the planet. We make a flock of parrots seem like Trappist monks. And when there is a big event, the urge—the deep need—to communicate with other humans becomes overwhelming. Technology just makes us more able to communicate, more able to be human. We can not only tell people when we got home what we saw (Hey, honey, guess what!), we can show them what we saw. That doesn’t mean we can only live vicariously; it simply means we can experience more fully at second hand what we didn’t (fortunately or unfortunately) experience firsthand.
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