Digital Culture in the Twenty-first Century - Digital Culture - page 189

This is nicely indicated by the title of a topic about the attacks
written by Middle East expert and academic Fred Halliday, Tw o H o u r s
that Shook the World . 2 Halliday's title clearly refers to journalist John
Reed's classic eyewitness account of the Bolshevik revolution of
October 1917, Ten Days that Shook the World (1919). 3 The difference
between the two titles indicates with admirable economy the in-
creasing speed at which world-transforming events take place. This
speeding up is directly related to the increasing ubiquity and avail-
ability of media, digital and otherwise, through which such events
can be witnessed. News of the events during the Russian Revolution
was only obtainable afterwards through print media such as news-
papers. By the time of the September 11 attacks it was possible for
people all over the world to watch the assaults more or less as they
took place and to witness the aftermath, including the dramatic
collapse of the towers themselves. Furthermore this was not just
possible through mainstream media such as television but also
through news websites. In fact the demand for news was so great that
the Internet more or less seized up and many people abandoned it
and turned to radio and television.
Nevertheless the speed at which news of the attacks went around
the globe was evidence of a highly interconnected world brought
together, in part at least, by new media and new technologies. Soon
after, bulletin boards and chatrooms on the Web became host to an
extraordinary proliferation of eye-witness accounts, images, debates,
conspiracy theories and accusations about the attacks. Much of this
discussion took place through Web-based phenomena such as 'blogs'
(short for weblogs, regularly updated and automatically archived
webpages, often though not always personal, in which opinions and
ideas could be expressed and debated). Interestingly the organization
supposedly responsible for the attacks, Al-Qaeda, was itself a product
of the widely distributed and loosely connected, non-hierarchical
structuring made possible by the Internet and the World Wide Web,
as well as mobile telephony and other developments in information