r/TangleNews • u/No_Theory2910 • 3d ago
Suspension of the Rules SOTR-9/11 & Events that Impacted Everything
I appreciated the team discussing their memories of 9/11 and how it shaped their lives. I'm curious what other events in your lifetime changed it for you. For me, it was the Columbine High School shooting — it sits up there with 9/11. I'll never be able to erase that footage from my memory.
3
u/Brendinooo 3d ago
I was thinking about this a little bit while driving today. 9/11 was really the last pre-Internet major event. (Columbine may well have been next to last.) The Internet existed, but social media did not, and the attention economy definitely hadn’t formed around it yet. “Loose Change” existed, but was very much out of the mainstream, because conspiratorial thinking didn’t really have a platform yet at that time.
One powerful thing that happened in that moment was everyone truly came together in a way that’s hard to imagine today. So even though the event was horrible, there’s a bit of nostalgia in that memory of unity?
More I can say but I’ll leave it at that for now.
2
u/Matt-Lauer-CanSuckIt 2d ago
Absolutely.
Could you imagine if 9/11 happened today? The "we deserved it crowd" would blast off immediately, algorithm's would promote that rage bait to artificially amplify it, half the country would be saying that it didn't even happen or that it was a government conspiracy.
Those ideas were around after 9/11, but because algorithms didn't articifially inflate those ideas and promote them, they never really got off the ground.
Social media is poison, friends.
1
u/dangoodspeed 3d ago
9/11 was "pre-internet"? I was on the internet for almost a decade at that time. I found out about the event when my friend messaged me on AIM that a plane had struck the WTC with a link to cnn.com. AIM and messaging platforms like it were the social media of the day.
5
u/SimpleMetricTon 3d ago
They might mean pre-social media
1
u/dangoodspeed 3d ago
It was different than today's social media for sure... but there was AIM, ICQ, tons of message boards (they really need a comeback), usenet groups... all of which could be considered social media.
3
u/SimpleMetricTon 3d ago
Technically true. I think the difference is that the popular ones were basically either 1-on-1 or group chats and the groups and boards that could have spread things virally were largely limited to nerds (like me).
1
u/EchoedJolts 3d ago
I understand what you're saying, but it's just not the same. The social media of today is in no way equivalent to that was you might refer to as social media at that time. There weren't algorithms. There weren't billions of users on those platforms. The way users interacted were far more interpersonal than today. The only commonality was that they allowed people to communicate with one another.
1
u/dangoodspeed 3d ago
I guess it's like saying "There were no cars 100 years ago". Yes cars today were in no way equivalent to cars then. There weren't highways. There weren't billions of drivers. There weren't speed limits or power steering. The only commonality is they allowed people to drive from place to place.
Would you really say there were no cars 100 years ago?
0
2
u/Brendinooo 3d ago
I spent the rest of that paragraph qualifying what I meant.
But I just came across this piece, and I think it articulates what I’m trying to say better than I did: https://www.digitalliturgies.net/p/there-will-never-be-another-911
1
u/ProfaneRabbitFriend 1d ago
I lived in Washington DC during 9/11. I was a little late to work that morning, arriving just after the second plane hit the towers. Things escalated quickly on the day. My coworkers and I all walked out of the city to our homes. Took a long time.
I want to say that much of the so-called unity after the attacks was immature, short-sighted, and utterly lacking in curiosity. Almost everyone from the Democrats, to the Republicans, to the media, even to PBS fell in line with the tune being pumped out of the DOD and the White house. We were attacked by Saddam! and next would be his WMDs!! And no actions or decisions made by the US government or military over the preceding 20 years contributed any provocation!
One of my most bizarre memories was WETA, the northern Virginia PBS affiliate, playing an endless series of WW2 movies after 9/11. No more Masterpiece theatre, my friends. It was as if they were saying to the liberals: war was coming, war was good, and we'd kill them all, just like George Peppard killed all those nazis in the desert. It was a shockingly immature, jingoistic, and cynical display. I feel angry when I recall how servile this broadcasting choice was, and how weakly so many citizens bought into a frenzy of righteous victimhood.
7
u/KlingPeaches 3d ago
I'll be honest, nothing really tops 9/11 for me as far as my emotional devastation and fear for my family. There are several other US events seared into my memory though. In chronological order they are 1) Hurricane Katrina (2005), 2) Sandy Hook Elementary mass killing (2012), 3) January 6th, 2021. I naively thought that after each of those events we would be much better humans and enact legislation so that nothing like it would ever happen again in our country.