[iwar] [fc:Column:.E-Mail.Broke.Through.Chaos.When.Phones.Couldn't]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-09-14 12:49:48
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From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
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Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2001 12:49:48 -0700 (PDT)
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Subject: [iwar] [fc:Column:.E-Mail.Broke.Through.Chaos.When.Phones.Couldn't]
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Column: E-Mail Broke Through Chaos When Phones Couldn't 
By Rob Pegoraro, Washigton Post, 9/14/2001
<a href="http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/170085.html">http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/170085.html>

I often make my living complaining about how poorly computers and the
Internet work. Tuesday, they were the only means of communication I had
left. 
With both cell phones and land lines yielding only busy signals, people
I knew started resorting to the electronic equivalent of throwing
pebbles at somebody's window. A few brief e-mails landed in inboxes,
with subject headers along the lines of: 
You there? 
Is everyone OK? 
It's what Internet users sometimes call "pinging" people -- sending a
signal into the void in the hope that it will be returned. 
The wait for that response took longer than I wanted, which is to say
longer than 30 seconds. 
An Internet marketing manager who works in Manhattan's Flatiron District
was among the first to answer. Arul began his response in rushed,
lowercase type: "am okay. the city's a mess." 
The terse sentences conveyed the stress as well as the tone of his voice
would have. A good thing, since no phone could reach him at his desk. 
Like everyone else in the office Tuesday, I still had a job to do. So I
tried to gather what information I could, in case someone needed it for
any of the dozens of stories in the works. One of my friend's colleagues
in Manhattan reached me via AOL's instant-messaging service. The
conversation scrolled down the screen like verses in a song: 
everyone was strewn about the street 
some with their radios in hand 
a parked car down by Spring Street (and Thompson) had the radio playing 
listening to the local news 
everyone was just looking up 
when the first building fell, people were screaming and pointing 
many started to cry 
i could feel it 
the rumble went through my chest 
He noted how many onlookers immediately yanked out their cell phones to
tell anybody they could reach what they had just seen. When bad news
happens, people need to share it. 
How odd for us to be able to chat away like a pair of teenagers, when
only one phone call in 12 went through to New York. How could this
technology still be working? Especially when the Web sites that were
supposed to report the news -- ours, the New York Times', New York
City's -- could barely function over the load? 
The Internet's core virtue, it's been said about 6.5 million times, is
that it's designed to survive damage to its components. Take out a key
switching point and traffic will route around it. Tuesday demonstrated
this in action: Although no phone lines could connect me to my friend's
office, the packets of data still found a way to jump in and out of
Manhattan. 
In another time, the phone lines would have gridlocked and that would
have been it. This week, one technology has picked up the load for
another -- and sometimes vice versa. I first heard about the attacks on
the radio, switched to the TV, followed developments on the Web until
most Web sites stopped working, then relied on e-mail and TV. 
Thursday afternoon, I had to switch back to the Web to read the other
papers when almost every vending machine in front of The Post's offices
was sold out. 
Meanwhile, a mailing list for technology journalists bubbled over with
first-person reports from the New York-based writers, as well as
expressions of sympathy, frustrated rants about how this could have
happened and wishes for a quick vengeance. Messages were arriving as
often as one every two or three minutes. (By Wednesday, a few members
commented that they were feeling a little overloaded.) 
This mailing list reminded me that the art of essay writing is alive and
flourishing on the Internet. Writers need to write, especially when the
situation defies explanation -- sometimes the only cure is to throw
words at the screen for a while. The clipped prose and matter-of-fact
descriptions that kept arriving in my inbox were the obvious product of
people far too rattled to think of clever metaphors. 
When I got home that night, I found other people had been pinging me at
my home e-mail account. A friend in Denver hadn't been able to get
through on the phone and wanted to know if I was okay. 
I, in turn, realized I had never gotten in touch with another friend --
a reporter for Fordham University's radio station in the Bronx. I fired
off a weary, stream-of-consciousness e-mail, wondering what the protocol
is for informing an e-mail sender that the intended recipient is no
longer around to read the message. 
Her reply came Wednesday morning. She was shaken up, but okay otherwise. 
That morning, I also got a reply from a freelancer whom I'd e-mailed
about a review Tuesday evening. He said his sister was a flight
attendant on American Airlines Flight 11. For some reason, he
volunteered to keep working on his article. I told him to forget about
it. 
I bought him a card that afternoon. That slip of paper feels as
inadequate to convey the sense of loss as words on the screen do
sometimes. 
Yet those lines of text were all we had for much of Tuesday. It is
because we can reach family, friends and colleagues in the midst of a
horrific day like Tuesday that we put up with the frustrations of
computing. E-mail and instant messaging can be one of the worst ways to
communicate known to man, but sometimes they're the only way. 
We should be thankful they're around. We should hope they continue to
get easier to use -- as fitful as that progress seems, sometimes. And we
should hope that we never have an occasion like this to talk about
again.

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