Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Sept. 11 and the rise of blogging Wired magazine's article is "9/11 and the Birth of the Blog." Dan Gillmor, who made the same observation in his We the Media book a couple of years ago, agrees. Slate: Bloggers remember... Long-time bloggers Glenn Reynolds and Dave Winer reflected on the anniversary, and and pointed back to their own blogs on that day -- a day that, for Dave, included making sure that his father in was O.K. in New York. Another veteran blogger, Rebecca Blood, doesn't talk about her blog from that day, but what her niece (age 8) had to say later. As for me... I wasn't calling it "blogging" yet... but I spent the afternoon rewriting my syllabus for an online journalism class... It was supposed to meet for the first time that afternoon.  Our Emerson College classroom buildings in Boston, a short drive from the airport where the planes were hijacked, had been evacuated since morning, but I headed to the office and started building a list of links, many of which still work. My morning class was eerie. Vague news about "a plane crash" had come over the radio as I was leaving the office, in a rush across the Boston Common to the classroom building. No one could tell me any more when I got to the room... So I blithely instructed my computer lab full of freshmen to go search the Web and "find out what's going on in New York this morning" while I passed out the syllabus. At first I didn't read any of the screens myself, but paced the room prattling on about our "Digital Culture" course, about the differences between the lab Macs and their home PCs, and about little Web-searching tricks... while they read the horrible news. The non-academic reality of what was happening gradually made it to their professor. Then we were told to evacuate the building. Planes, after all, had been hijacked from Boston and could still be in the air. One of my strongest memories: As we filed down the stairs, a student asked me whether the Boston subways would still be running, so that he could get home. Professors know so much. 1:51:33 PM    comment []

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