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Hot Topic by Brigit Wassmuth WThe events
of September 11, 2001 have changed my life. I'm a news junkie by nature,
but I just could not believe I had seen the twin towers of the World Trade
Center crumble. I watched television news all day. Eventually, I got tired of watching the towers collapse over and over and over again on CNN. But I couldn't sleep. A world citizen by heritage, researcher by heart, and skeptic by training, I felt compelled to learn more. So I turned to the Web and spent the night browsing 110 international online newspapers to read about the terrorist acts from a wide variety of perspectives. I found many confirmations of the tragedy, but I also learned something else that night. While working in this instant mode of digital, global communication, Marshall McLuhan's theory of media as the extensions of man became real. Never before did I appreciate his argument that we fill every new technology with the content of the previous one. In his days, it was TV that reprocessed film and the movies. In the 1980s, it was the personal computer that was used like an "intelligent" typewriter. And for the past 10 years, the World Wide Web has been treated like a glorified television. Recent data show that, on September 11 and during the days that followed, the click of the mouse nearly replaced the click of the remote control, because the Internet offered what TV could not---a broader perspective, more immediacy, greater diversity, and, perhaps most importantly, a sense of control. In my opinion, the terrorist acts of September 11, 2001 may have been the Internet's turning point. Because, finally, it has become a medium in its own right. To remain accessible, many news sites stripped away all unnecessary and unrelated visual images, animation, and design features that slow download time. The Web survived this test by becoming more text-based and less visually complex. Its identity was, at last, different from that of television. The Internet enabled consumers of information to become producers of information. For example: One of my former students works in a lower Manhattan advertising agency and used the Web to document what he saw that day. He sent the URL (www.notrom.com) of his Web site to friends and colleagues around the world. Sites like this are raw and touching and provide the kind of information commercial producers of information usually don't offer. I trust the Internet more than ever before, mainly for the diversity and immediacy it o ffers. And I agree with McLuhan who says that any technology gradually creates a totally new human environment. Maybe, finally, we do live in that global (electronic) village he described some 40 years ago. At sunrise of September 12, I called my sister in France. Her first words were, "Are you OK? I've been trying to call you for hours but couldn't get through." Unlike the 30 million people who went online September 11, who sent more than 1.2 billion instant messages through AOL, who sent email to friends, colleagues, family, and loved ones in New York (according to Yahoo! magazine November 2001), it had not occurred to my sister to check her e-mail.
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