In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing and subsequent manhunt for the perpetrators I had some thoughts about how the Internet has affected the flow of news in the dozen years since the 9/11 attacks. I think it’s important to point out that I always bristle when people make grand pronouncements about the impact of a particular service or technology directly on the heels of a major catastrophe so that’s not what I’m trying to do here. Rather, I wanted to highlight the differences between my approach to keeping up with the news following each of those major stories.
On 9/11 I was sitting in an office with my my Internet Explorer browser showing my My Yahoo portal page when a headline appeared that said something like “Plane Strikes World Trade Center.” When I clicked the link it went to a page with just a title and no content. On April 15, 2013 I had just started to walk from my car to an airport terminal when I received a push notification on my iPhone from the Seeking Alpha app. I clicked through the push notification to read the update, which linked to a post on Twitter (by a non-news reporter) with a picture that clearly showed a smoky scene and blood on the ground. So while I was initially confused on 9/11 as to the nature of the incident, I was more aware right away on April 15 that something nefarious had occurred.
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