Maybe you were a kid at school, feeling sick and talking with classmates about the uncertain new future, maybe you were woken up by a loved one's phone call and told to turn on the bloody telly, maybe you were out of contact for a few hours and came back to find the whole world had turned upside down.
It was 16 years ago now, but unless you're a teenager or younger, you know exactly where you were.
There were far greater examples of man's inhumanity to man throughout the 20th century, but this attack, right at the heart of capitalism, right on the goddamn doorstep of the 21st century, shook western civilisation to its core. It led to more useless bloodshed and an air of fear and paranoia that has slowly and painfully led us here, where there are genuine fears of a nuclear Armageddon in the year 2017.
Any chance that we were on the fast-track to universal enlightenment was kicked in the fucking balls by the September 11 attacks. All that raving in the '90s about a glorious new aeon were just the same old shit.
And after a public display of naked aggression that was unparalleled in our modern age, the first thing everybody did after they saw the skyscrapers coming down was turn on the news, and look for some kind of information or explanation, just to help us make some sense of it all. News ratings spiked, circulations went through the roof and the internet instantly became the news delivery source for the next generation.
9/11 was the first multi-media terrorist event, but we've come so far since then. Now there are live blogs and video feeds, tweets. You can Facebook Live the end of the world when it all goes down, and everybody has got a HD camera in their pocket, as long as the battery lasts.
But as connected as we all are, there is also that feeling that you could be missing out on something huge, happening right now. That you just need to check in, to make sure North Korea hasn't been destroyed, or to find out the latest score in the cricket. Smartphones give us that connection to the world, through a huge variety of feeds, wiping away any suspicion that we're missing out on something important. We haven't been able to look away for 16 years now.
TV has tried to get in on the act, by filling the hole with 24-hour live news, which is fantastic when there is a big world-shuddering event going down, but not so much when they have to fill the rest of those hours throughout the other slow news days and resort to mindless, dull punditry to fill in the gaps between the ads.
Newspapers are, of course, still trapped into printing schedules, so can only really provide valuable context, background and reaction. Radio has always been super-immediate, but doesn't have the pictures to grab the attention. Unsurprisingly, it's online that the real 24-hour action is happening, with big news websites crunching through huge amounts of news every day - something like the NZ Herald is easily putting several hundred stories every day.
It's taken years for the big media websites to learn the lessons spelled out on a sunny Tuesday morning, 16 years and one day ago. They're still not quite there, still blindly reaching out for an audience that it knows is out there, selling its soul to social media and acting affronted when it bites back.
But we have also come a long, long way. Look at the 9/11 websites, and how crude they are, and how unacceptable they would be in this data-hungry age. If some thin-skinned buffoon sets off the end of the world any time soon, or even just ignores the disastrous effect of unquestionable climate change, we all face potential catastrophes that will dwarf the horror of 9/11. But at least we'll all have a front row seat.
- Margaret Tempest
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