What if Twitter had been around on 9/11?

Compared to ten years ago, I had a deeper empathy for the 9/11 survivors as they recounted their stories on CNN yesterday. Their mini-odysseys down the stairways reminded me of the emotions I had as I leaped down the stairs during the earthquake in the Washington, D.C. area on August 23: fear, loneliness, helplessness (the cop who lives in my apartment complex was running too).

After I made it to open air, the loneliness lingered longest. It was nice to get a hello from my next-door neighbor for the first time, but I needed touch people I knew, loved. So after a couple of minutes I leaped back up to the 4^th floor, grabbed my phone, ran back down, and logged on to Facebook and Twitter. So here I was, shaking my next-door neighbor’s hand for the first time in four years of residence and feeling a stronger sense of community on this device in the palm of my hands.

A recent piece in Foreign Policy ranks “The Invention of Social Media” five rungs above “The American Response to 9/11” on its list of the most important events of the past decade.

Yes, no, maybe, I don’t know. But what if the two events had met on 9/11?

A Google search revealed, as I expected, that someone else had been thinking about this hypothetical. His piece focuses on the speculations and end-of-world messages that would have resulted—the public expression. He gives less attention to what, in my view, could have been the most important differences.

Imagine the tweets:

“I’m on the x floor in Stairway y”; lives could have been saved.

“We’re about to tackle these bastards”; valuable information could have been shared.

“I’m not going to make it. I love you…”; invaluable good-byes could have been said.

But most updates would probably have been a bit more graphic than is appropriate to imagine. Eery, I know—for the living. But for a person in the last moments of life, knowing that hundreds of family, friends, and a whole nation were “following” him or her, could have taken away the loneliness and provided comfort.

The question then is about whose interests are paramount. And these are not questions of idle speculation. We are living with social media. Any such disaster in the future will call for sophisticated responses.

One practical implication we can discuss now could be to explore the technology and systems for first responders to, say, channel all the tweets from a certain geographical area and ban all others in order to share actionable information, keep the servers running, and protect privacy. If the system exists already, great!

Ask yourself: If you had the opportunity, would you rather go with a whimper or with a tweet?