[This abridged version of a comprehensive essay in Vanity Fair describes how then-new breakthroughs in media technologies and the horrific events of September 11, 2001 “ushered in the age of global simultaneity” and brought billions of people closer to those events, their aftermath, and each other. The author cites two theorists to note potential positive implications of the new technologies – the recognition of our common humanity in an interconnected global community – and negative ones that seem all too prevalent in 2026: the rise of cultures consumed by media spectacle, and uncertainty about, and polarized misperceptions of, reality. See the original version of the essay for 19 vivid images. –Matthew]

[Image: A crowd of stunned New Yorkers witness the collapse of the South Tower of the World Trade Center at 9:59am on September 11, 2001. Credit: Patrick Witty]

9/11 Changed the World in Many Ways. It Also Spawned the Digital Media Era

With shock and awe, the attacks altered an already image-saturated media ecosystem—and so much more.

By David Friend
September 10, 2026

Some say that 9/11 would have been even more horrific had it taken place today. There would have been smartphones on the planes, these fatalists insist. There would have been Instagram and TikTok posts from inside the buildings. The horrors of September 11, 2001, much of it recorded from afar by video cameras, would have been amplified, they say, because we would have seen the images that victims sent to their families: their lives up close, extinguished one by one. Or so claim these prophets of inverted doom who conjure a past that never was, as shaped by the fractured lens of the present.

The truth is: The horrors could not have been made more horrific. Yes, the atrocities occurred before social media took hold, before video streaming, before camera phones became commonplace. And yet, no current-day technology could have intensified the shock or gravity of an event that was already, immeasurably, traumatic.

Twenty-five years have passed. Survivors, even now, still grapple with their private grief, while those born after the attacks (or those who were too young at the time to remember) try to process the magnitude of the carnage. In a single onslaught, 2,977 lives were taken in the deadliest one-day attack on US soil since the Battle of Antietam. Some find it hard to believe their eyes when presented with the visual evidence from among the tens of thousands photographs and the countless hours of video transmitted that day. Many cannot fathom how the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, once the tallest human-made structures on earth, absorbed the impact of two hijacked airliners. Or how both buildings collapsed, as if in slow-motion, claiming fatalities floor by floor, then block by block. Or how one jet slammed into the Pentagon before another, bound for the Capitol Building, crashed in a Pennsylvania field after passengers banded together in an effort to overtake the hijackers.

Within weeks of the attacks, I began researching a book about the stories behind the images of 9/11. Its title: Watching the World Change. Now, a generation later, it seems worthwhile to reexamine some of the passages and assertions from the book, with the benefit of hindsight, as a way of asking: What has changed?

Revisiting the observations I made back then, and since, it’s clear that subsequent advances in media and technology have changed how we disseminate, manipulate, and believe visual information—and how such breakthroughs have changed terrorism, war, the tactics of autocrats, and of those who oppose them.

All of this, of course, pales in the shadow of the day. Nothing can be said that makes much of a difference, at all, amid the inconsolable loss: the decades endured; the mourning for so many whose loved ones’ remains were never returned; the bright futures of thousands of innocents, stolen in an instant.

Whatever else September 11 did, it ushered in the age of global simultaneity.

The whole world, literally, was watching. Never before had more people seen the same news event at the same moment. An estimated two billion people or more—a third of the species—saw the attacks in real time or watched coverage in that day’s news reports. “If you think about the rise of terrorism since 9/11,” explained David Hazinski, the former head of the University of Georgia’s broadcast news initiative, five years after the attacks, “it’s almost proof that terrorist[s] recognize this is a global village. Now you have the potential to reach a two and a half billion audience for your act.”

[snip]

Three new technologies, all coming of age at the turn of the millennium, allowed much of the planet to see the same image, concurrently. The first breakthrough was the World Wide Web. On September 11, the nascent medium, introduced in the early 1990s, featured long-lens shots of the towers on an array of news outlets and websites. But the story was also conveyed by amateur bloggers and civilians with cameras, who had the poise and wherewithal to post images, alerts, and their own anguished reactions so that the world would see with their own eyes—and respond. In effect, they created a community bulletin board for newsbreaks, and heartbreak.

In 2011, on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, I described in The Wall Street Journal how intrepid citizens that day had spearheaded a new mode of journalism. They’d been compelled to rush downtown “to document the attack and its aftermath. Their images, as much as those from stationary TV cameras or professional photographers, became our window onto the calamity. Meanwhile, countless others used their pagers, phones, and PCs to enter firsthand reports of what things were like in Lower Manhattan. Thousands more, forwarding those accounts around the world, helped produce a people’s chronicle of 9/11 that corresponds with—rivals, really—the record seen on television and in print. What was extraordinary that day has become thoroughly familiar.” Today, in fact, when a news event happens, we don’t just anticipate a cloud of civilian-generated photos and videos; we have come, for better or for worse, to demand it.

The second innovation central to our view of 9/11 was electronic newsgathering. In 1991, during the Gulf War, America and its allies began bombing Baghdad in response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. CNN’s team was granted access to a special phone line and transmitted exclusive coverage of the conflict. Once Iraqi authorities permitted a mobile TV ground station to be shipped in, CNN was able to broadcast live.

By 2001, TV images were being transmitted by satellite and by fiber-optic cable snaking across the ocean floor. Moreover, much of the footage on September 11 was digital, and therefore easier to compress electronically to share instantaneously. (More than 80% of Americans, according to a Pew Research Center study, first got news of the attacks by TV; just 3% of web users chose the internet as their prime news source.)

The third quantum leap was digital photography. At the time, photojournalists were beginning the transition from traditional roll film to memory cards. Photographers, armed with digital cameras, could now take, edit, and archive a picture in under a minute, then send it on in seconds, electronically, to a newspaper, magazine, or website. For a breaking news event like 9/11, shot in a life-threatening environment, visual velocity was critical.

A truly tragic example of this technological pivot was the last day in the life of Bill Biggart. On the morning of September 11, Biggart made 304 frames: 150 pictures on film and 154 digital images. Along with fellow photographers by the score, he had sped toward the trade center—as did untold numbers of first responders—even as citizens by the thousands fled.

The hard truth was evidenced by his camera’s memory card, later extracted from the wreckage. The last photograph was time-stamped at 10:28:24: seconds before the north tower began to implode above him. He would become the only working photojournalist to die at Ground Zero.

Wendy Doremus, his widow, told me that her husband “was at the cusp of photography,” as if he embodied his profession at its inflection point. “Half the film Bill carried that day was digital, half color negatives and slides. September 11 became that watershed day. After that, photographers went digital.”

[snip]

Beginning on September 6, for an exhibition titled “2001,” [artist Wolfgang] Staehle used a remote, stationary webcam to render still photos of the downtown skyline every four seconds and automatically send them to a computer, then to a projector, which beamed each image, mural-size, on an art gallery wall. By happenstance, Staehle managed to capture a visual sequence of the planes hitting the towers, the towers collapsing, and on and on. Staehle’s exhibition was meant to get at the sum and substance of the concept of “real time.” (Staehle’s gallery show not only recorded the World Trade Center scene, but, on two other walls, a former Benedictine monastery near Staehle’s hometown and a Berlin TV transmitter—the panoramas shifting slightly as time ticked along.) But instead of depicting the Zen-like connectivity of what I call global simultaneity—the ability to witness identical events, worldwide—Staehle had inadvertently chronicled the deadliest terror attack in modern history.

[snip]

The images of September 11 were bona fide depictions of a real-world event. But no sooner had they surfaced than conspiracists began to sow doubt. The whole subculture of 9/11 “truthers” (deliberate propagandists, genuine adherents, or duped observers promoting false or debunked narratives about the attacks) helped engender a fabricated universe in which hundreds of speculative theories could coalesce. Soon came “birthers,” “crisis actors,” and “alternative facts”—a phrase coined in 2017 by Trump’s senior adviser Kellyanne Conway during her boss’s first week in office.

Ironically, the three tech developments discussed above have played their own roles in the erosion of the public’s trust in what it encounters online and elsewhere. It is a skepticism made more acute by the ongoing contraction of traditional media outlets. Cable news networks, even as they cover actual events, reserve substantial airtime for pundits who spout dubious claims or patent falsehoods. Certain corners of the web promote hoaxes and hate speech and reputational sabotage. The news footage and still pictures that, in 2001, provided a critical mass of objective truth, have now given way to a mediated world flooded by doctored photos, AI hybrids, and deepfakes.

“The vivid and visceral images of the attacks,” says photography scholar Fred Ritchin, whose most recent book is The Synthetic Eye: Photography Transformed in the Age of AI, “were not only excruciatingly riveting, the stuff of nightmare, but were understood to be inherently credible. Twenty-five years later, iconic photographs and videos that can change the ways the world sees itself are rare, displaced by memes vying to become viral and undercut by AI-generated photorealistic images that make any visual representation of contemporary events seem suspect.

“Autocrats and others, reflexively labeling photos and videos as ‘fake news’ whenever they contradict their preexisting belief system, further challenges their legitimacy. Now it is the unreal that is made to overwhelm the existence of the painful realities that we face. The acute pain and suffering of those in the Twin Towers, and their loved ones, would most likely, in today’s media fog, soon be reduced to fodder in an image war.”

What are the implications when much of humanity witnesses the same pyrotechnic abomination at the same time? For all the horror that issued from that day, it is hard to convey the outpouring of goodwill, solidarity, and condolence that came the nation’s way. Expressions of concern and comfort, from every quarter, were the result of universal sympathy. People everywhere grieved for America.

By sharing in the terror that was evoked by the same imagery—and the stories told by bystanders and bloggers and newscasters—people the world over could identify with how America felt, could shudder from imagining the multitude of loved ones in anguish. As I wrote back then, we felt closer to one another because, even though we might have had no direct experience of the attacks, being separated from it by zip codes or oceans, what we did share was the experience of viewing the event as it was occurring. We felt closer because we ached upon seeing it all, and we believed that we all ached in the same way. We felt closer because we felt a subliminal proximity, an interdependence with the strangers in the towers whom we could only dimly see—innocents like us, who had undertaken the most common of all social acts: They had gone to work that day.

We watched and the world shrank, in that instant.

Without discounting the horror and the sorrow, or the wars that followed, we would do well to recall the words of Marshall McLuhan, the prophet of media culture, who in 1960 had forecast the dawn of a “global village.” He maintained that television and other “electric media” were already starting to turn humankind into a single, electronically connected community. And with this sense of unity, he ventured, there might come, in time, an acknowledgment of one’s obligations to society. (Spoiler alert, Dr. McLuhan: Regardless of our electronic existence, we already inhabit a cosmos in which everything, every force, everywhere, is interdependent.)

McLuhan wrote of this new wired world: “Electric speed in bringing all social and political functions together in a sudden implosion has heightened human awareness of responsibility to an intense degree.” African Americans, young people, and other marginalized groups, he said, “can no longer be contained, in the political sense of limited association. They are now involved in our lives, as we in theirs, thanks to electric media.” In short, McLuhan forecast a welcoming dawn.

We would also do well to heed the warning of philosopher Guy Debord, whose work was cited now and again after the events of September 11. In 1967, Debord cautioned that ours was becoming a culture consumed by media and “spectacle.” And so it has become. With search engines and AI, we pull in answers from the ether. With social media, we elevate the exhibitionist and the voyeur. With streaming services and YouTube and 24/7 content, we can binge our days silly. In a way, we risk becoming a culture of viewers instead of doers, a society of spectators.

Debord suggested as much 60 years ago in his book The Society of the Spectacle, anticipating virtual reality’s triumph:

Life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation. The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudo-world that can only be looked at…. The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual excess produced by mass-media technologies. It is a worldview that has actually been materialized, that has become an objective reality.