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9/11 Immediacy Report

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While watching the live coverage of 911 on CNN, I was surprised by the immediacy of the use of the eyewitness accounts over the telephone and live. The first one was before anyone knew what was going on, including the news anchors. They then continued to bombard the viewer with eyewitness interviews over and over as if they were scrambling to throw us directly into the event and feel as though we are there before any other information was known besides these eyewitness accounts. I thought about the immediacy of the simulation through eyewitness accounts and thought that it may have to do with the catastrophic characteristics that the event had possessed and would potentially possess. From the viewpoint of catastrophe theory, it could be measured by the disruption of what was a typical Tuesday morning. I think the …show more content…

I thought about the amount of lives that were at risk from the event and that that may have increased the measure of the catastrophe, but as Doane emphasizes, the amount of deaths doesn’t necessary determine a catastrophic event because of past examples such as Chernobyl and the Challenger explosion. Instead, we can look at the 9/11 coverage in terms of the potential of a technological collapse. As I watched the coverage, I was thinking that people really must have been confused when the coverage was airing live. There was a hole in a building and from the eyewitness account, a plane had crashed into it. Those two points alone have significantly a lot to do with technology. They raise many questions such as how would a technologically advanced plane crash into a modern skyscraper? What caused this plane to do this? This immediately brings the idea of whether technological failure is at fault into the minds of the viewers and the

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