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Tuesday, September 25, 2001
Say when? 
| | I was among the millions in the United States who sat glued to the television and watched the drama as though it was a made-for-television film. The television had desensitized us. Thousands of innocent men, women and children were being blown to bits and instead of feeling sorry for them we marveled at the efficiency of our military. |
| | First, we must understand that nonviolence is not a strategy that we can use in times of peace and discard in a moment of crisis. Nonviolence is about personal attitudes, about becoming the change we wish to see in the world. Because, a nation's collective attitude is based on the attitude of the individual. Nonviolence is about building positive relationships with all human beings relationships that are based on love, compassion, respect, understanding and appreciation. |
| | Nonviolence is also about not judging people as we perceive them to be that is, a murderer is not born a murderer; a terrorist is not born a terrorist. People become murderers, robbers and terrorists because of circumstances and experiences in life. Killing or confining murders, robbers, terrorists, or the like is not going to rid this world of them. For every one we kill or confine we create another hundred to take their place. What we need to do is dispassionately analyze both the circumstances that create such monsters and how we can help eliminate those circumstances. Focusing our efforts on the monsters, rather than what creates the monsters, will not solve the problems of violence. Justice should mean reformation and not revenge. |
| | Hard reading. But as an extreme goes, it's hard to beat. |
Pulling out of the tale-spin
| | I just added EndTheCycle.org to my Loverolling list (over there on the right). |
| | The cycle is a story. George Lakoff calls it a fairy tale, though it's also a devil's tale in which we substitute whole groups of people for the bad guys who hide among them. |
| | It's sappy to say, but the only way to defeat hate is with love. Let it flow. |
Democracy on Internet time
| | Congress is getting ready to act on anti-terrorist legislation that would compromise a raft of privacy and civil liberty protections we have long taken for granted. The EFF position on the matter is here. A less lengthy appeal is made here. The Register's angle: Bush admin to make hacking a terrorist offence. |
| | The legislation itself is here. |
The Marks Plan, 1.01
Mending habits
| | Television is returning to normal. Peter Jennings is back to his usual half hour per day (I think he peaked at about 27 hours during the days after September 11). Of the 4,583 channels on our satellite system, about 3,000 of them are showing an ad right now. |
| | But for awhile there, the tube was something else. It showed us the worst thing we have ever seen in real time: hundreds dying in a skyscraper fire, people jumping to their deaths from windows twelve hundred feet above the ground. Then it showed something even worse: the first live commercial airplane crash, killing hundreds in an instant. Then it showed something worse still: the collapse of a skyscraper, killing thousands. Then it showed what we all hoped wouldn't happen: the collapse of the second skyscraper, killing thousands more. |
| | Then it gave us stories, endless stories: of heroism, loss, more heroism... and the awful silence. |
| | We had to watch. Together. |
| | Now comes the Pew Internet & American Life Project, with a report on what else we did at the same time. A third of us hung a flag. Over half called somebody on the phone. About a quarter called to see if someone was safe. About a fifth attended a religious service. About one in ten cancelled travel plans. |
| | And here's what it said about those of us who hang out here: |
| | Internet users were more likely than nonusers to display some kinds of emotional and civic engagement with their country. Online Americans were among the most fervent to attend meetings and attempt to donate blood. |
| | In the 48 hours after the crisis, 13% of Internet users "attended" virtual meetings or participated in virtual communities by reading or posting comments in chat rooms, online bulletin boards, or email listservs. That is substantially greater than normal. On a typical day only 4% of online Americans visit chat rooms. |
| | After the terror attacks, Internet users were doing everything online from grieving, to comforting each other, to having reasoned discussions about policy options, to having flame wars where emotions ran high and insults were exchanged. Online communities were an emotional, spiritual, cerebral, primal, and sorrowful place for Americans to sort out their feelings and hash out their views. |
| | More than 70 million Internet users tried to make phone calls to family members and friends on the day of the attacks. More than a third of those Internet users who tried to place calls on Tuesday (35%) had trouble getting through to people they tried to contact by phone and a fifth of them turned to the Internet to make contact with loved ones and friends. That comes to between 4-5 million people who turned to the Internet because the phones weren't working well enough for them. |
| | Some 29% of Internet users tried to get news of the crisis online on the day of the attacks - that constitutes about 30 million American adults. About 43% of them said they had problems getting to the sites they wanted to access. Of those who had trouble, 41% kept trying to get to the same site until they finally reached it; 38% went to other sites, 19% gave up their search. Many news sites recognized this problem quickly and redesigned their pages to strip out graphics, ads, and other features that would make their pages time-consuming to download. |
| | A quarter of Internet users were multitasking on Tuesday by having the TV or radio on while they were surfing or sending email. |
| | All of which is nice to hear, but fails to square with what we really experienced. What were we talking about? |
| | Mostly it was stories. Countless individual stories, and one big one. |
| | Every commercial TV network ran the same program, with the same title: "Attack on America." And every Web journal, in its own way, was asking or answering what we meant by that. |
| | If this had happened ten years ago — and given the technology involved, it easily could have — TV the mainstream media would have told the whole story. Some small percentage of the rest of us would have written letters to editors or something; but the prevaiing wisdom would have been almost entirely received. |
| | By nearly all accounts, television and print journalism are worse than ever. Foreign bureaus have closed. Editorial staffs have been consolidated and downsized as more big media have merged and and re-merged and re-emerged as vast beasts obsessed with aggregating shares of attention held captive for advertising. |
| | But I think all of journalism better than ever, because so many more of us are involved. |
| | Here on the Web, anybody can write anything. If it's any good, others will link to it. If it needs correcting or improvement, others will let the writer know. Here everybody is Poor Richard. And the world is richer for the experience. |
| | Including the big media, which now have more sources than ever among those who in the former world were sitting mute behind popcorn. |
Watch different?
| | David Coursey: Maybe Apple and the ReplayTV folks can get together to challenge UltimateTV. |
Business in Reality
| | I've been looking some more through TBTF's Unblinking List of World Trade Center tenants, and the picture it gives is amazing. |
| | There are projects like ARC — Access to the Region's Core — that seem to have persisted in cyberspace while their physical space has gone to God: |
| | ARC is located at:
One World Trade Center
Suite 61N
New York, NY 10048
Phone: 212-435-4411
Fax: 212-435-4208 |
| | As we know all too well, there's almost always a disaster somewhere. And each time, representatives from Adjusters International and the rest of the insurance industry are on the scene, helping people to put their lives back together. |
| | That from the 47th floor of 1 World Trade Center. |
| | William M. Mercer has a support system set up for employees, family and friends. I could crash it, but it seems too private. Am I a "friend?" Not really. |
| | Then there's AON Risk Management Corporation, which occupied four floors upwards of 92 in the South Tower. The Web site is a model of both crisis management and human outreach by a company and its surviving employees to each other. There is nothing here that looks like it came from a rule book, got run past Legal or got jobbed out to an agency. Bravo. |
Heading out
| | This morning the electricians will come around 7:30, turn everything off and upgrade my office (among other places in the house) to circuits capable of supporting more than one computer at a time. At different times I need to run four in here, plus two printers, a scanner, various other peripherals and the requisite audio junk. |
| | Then around 2pm I head for the airport for a trip to San Francisco, where I'll be on the same panel with Dave Winer (the moderator), Rick Smolan, Jason Kottke, Bruce Koon and Neil Chase on Wednesday morning. Should be fun. |
| | Meanwhile I have a pile of stuff I need to get done for Linux Journal, so the blogging will probably be light today. |
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