I have finally gotten around to reading Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture and was struck, considering the events in London of the past few days, by the following:
When two planes crashed into the World Trade Center, another into the Pentagon, and a fourth into a Pennsylvania field, all media around the world shifted to this news. Every moment of just about every day for that week, and for weeks after, television in particular, and media generally, retold the story of the events we had just witnessed. The telling was a retelling, because we had seen the events that were described. The genius of this awful act of terrorism was that the delayed second attack was perfectly timed to assure that the whole world would be watching.
These retellings had an increasingly familiar feel. There was music scored for the intermissions, and fancy graphics that flashed across the screen. There was a formula to interviews. There was “balance”, and seriousness. This was news choreographed in the way we have increasingly come to expect it, “news as entertainment”, even if the entertainment is tragedy.
But in addition to this produced news about the “tragedy of September 11,” those of us tied to the Internet came to see a very different production as well. The Internet was filled with accounts of the same events. Yet these Internet accounts had a very different flavor. Some people constructed photo pages that captured images from around the world and presented them as slide shows with text. Some offered open letters. There were sound recordings. There was anger and frustration. There were attempts to provide context. There was, in short, an extraordinary worldwide barn raising, in the sense Mike Godwin uses the term in his book Cyber Rights, around a news event that had captured the attention of the world. There was ABC and CBS, but there was also the Internet.
I don’t mean simply to praise the Internet – though I do think the people who supported this form of speech should be praised. I mean instead to point to a significance in this form of speech. For like a Kodak, the Internet enables people to capture images. And like in a movie by a student on the “Just Think!” bus, the visual images could be mixed with sound or text.
But unlike any technology for simply capturing images, the Internet allows these creations to be shared with an extraordinary number of people, practically instantaneously. This is something new in our tradition – not just that culture can be captured mechanically, and obviously not just that events are commented upon critically, but that this mix of captured images, sound, and commentary can be widely spread practically instantaneously.
The book is over a year old. Events, both tragic and joyous, drive us to share our experience – to share our reality – it’s what people do. The net is providing new tools to do so.