TOBY SHAPSHAK: 9/11 Twitter
News breaks on Twitter are now part of our online firmament, but where to for the 140-character social network, asks Toby Shapshak?
Fifteen years ago I turned on the television minutes before the second hijacked plane crashed into the second World Trade Center tower in New York.Watching on CNN what is still one of the world’s worst terrorist attacks seems as surreal now as it did then. It was an audacious use of a seemingly harmless mode of transport that forever changed international air travel.Eight years later, in January 2009, an equally audacious, but positive event involving an airplane and New York City hit the news.The difference was that pilot Chesley Sullenberger landed his US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River after both engines were crippled by a bird strike.The news wasn’t broken on CNN or any major news channel, but by a guy on a ferry with a cellphone camera."There’s a plane on the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy," Janis Krums (@JKrums) tweeted, using an early — now defunct — picture-sharing service called TwitPic.Similarly, when bomb blasts ripped through London’s...
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