# 9/11 and the birth of the digital media age > Twenty-five years on, the day the whole world watched at once still explains how we see, doubt, and fake everything now. - Title: 9/11 and the birth of the digital media age · Vanity Fair - Summary: Twenty-five years on, the day the whole world watched at once still explains how we see, doubt, and fake everything now. 9/11 was the first event the whole… - Keywords: 9/11, media, surveillance, photography, misinformation, birth, digital, age, Vanity Fair - Source: Vanity Fair — https://vanityfair.com/story/how-9-11-altered-the-world - Author: David Friend - Published: 2026-09-10T18:11:38.842+00:00 - Read time: 4 min - Topics: 9/11, media, surveillance, photography, misinformation ## No phone could make it worse People argue 9/11 would have been more horrific with TikTok and smartphones. That gets it backwards. Nothing about today's tech could have deepened the shock of what already happened. > The horrors could not have been made more horrific. ## The numbers still refuse to land 2,977 people were killed, the deadliest single day on US soil since Antietam. A generation born after the attacks now studies the footage and struggles to believe it. ## Revisiting a book, 25 years on The author started researching Watching the World Change within weeks of the attacks. Now he goes back to his own claims with hindsight and asks one question: what changed? ## The age of global simultaneity Roughly two billion people, a third of the species, saw the attacks live or in that day's coverage. Never before had so many watched the same news at the same moment. > We watched and the world shrank, in that instant. ## Terror built for an audience Bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed picked the Twin Towers and the Pentagon for maximum exposure, America's supposed fortresses of money and military power. > Now you have the potential to reach a two and a half billion audience for your act. ## The morning slot was chosen A weekday morning on the East Coast was the one window when Europe, Africa and Asia were all still awake. The timing put the whole planet in front of the same screen. > This could be seen at once, anywhere, in both hemispheres, any latitude, any culture, live. ## The web turned everyone in News sites carried long-lens shots, but bloggers and civilians with cameras posted their own images and reactions too. They built a community bulletin board for newsbreaks and heartbreak. ## Citizen journalism was born downtown Ordinary people ran toward the attack with cameras and pagers, and their accounts rivalled what ran on television. What was extraordinary that day is now what we expect of every news event. > 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. ## Satellites, fiber, and live TV Electronic newsgathering, proven when CNN broadcast live from Baghdad in 1991, had matured. By 2001 digital footage moved by satellite and undersea cable, compressed and shared instantly. ## Television still won the day More than 80 percent of Americans first heard about the attacks on TV. Only 3 percent of web users named the internet as their main news source. ## Digital photography hit its hinge Photojournalists were mid-switch from roll film to memory cards. A digital camera let you shoot, edit and transmit in under a minute, and in a life-threatening scene that speed decided everything. ## Bill Biggart's last frame He shot 304 pictures that morning, 150 on film and 154 digital. His memory card, pulled from the wreckage, stopped at 10:28:24, seconds before the north tower came down on him. > Half the film Bill carried that day was digital, half color negatives and slides. September 11 became that watershed day. ## Surveillance became the law Weeks later Congress passed the Patriot Act, used to justify warrantless mass collection of phone and email data and indefinite detention of noncitizens. Homeland Security followed in 2002. ## The fix became the bureaucracy In 2004 Congress created a director of national intelligence to stop agencies working in silos. The office grew into the same sprawl it was meant to cure, sometimes led by unqualified people. ## Everything watches you now Pegasus spyware can switch on a phone's mic and camera silently. Facial recognition sharpens, doorbell cameras feed into networks, Flock cameras log license plates for police. ## Look for the profit motive Governments, telecoms, data brokers and AI firms all harvest behavior and records. AI companies take artists' and publishers' work by the terabyte, and money keeps winning over anything nobler. > When in doubt, look for the profit motive. ## The Arab Spring, double-edged Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Al Jazeera mobilized uprisings from Tunisia to Egypt. Then regimes tracked activists by their digital footprints and turned the same platforms into propaganda pipes. ## The forever wars Afghanistan in 2001, then Iraq in 2003. Saddam fell but the weapons of mass destruction did not exist, and Abu Ghraib burned through the world's sympathy for America. > The last US forces are due out of Iraq by September 30, a deadline Iraqi prime minister Ali al-Zaidi has called 'fixed and final'. ## Strongmen learned the lesson Al-Qaeda's murder-as-spectacle foreshadowed ISIS beheading videos. Since then leaders have found that brutality against civilians carries no bill, and every minor strongman is watching. > When the most powerful states act with impunity, every minor strongman takes note and assumes he'll never see the inside of a courtroom in The Hague. ## From truthers to deepfakes 9/11 conspiracists seeded the ground for birthers, crisis actors and alternative facts. The images that once carried automatic credibility now compete with memes, doctored photos and AI fakes. > Now it is the unreal that is made to overwhelm the existence of the painful realities that we face. ## Key takeaway 9/11 was the first event the whole planet witnessed in the same instant, and the tools that made that possible now make truth itself negotiable.