For eleven years, I wrote a column for an AdWeek publication, Marketing Computers, which then became Technology Marketing. This is the column I wrote following the events of September the 11th, 2001. I thing it's worth re-reading today.
Lessons Learned. Technology triumphed and failed on Sept. 11.
As I write this column, it is actually the third week in September, which means it's little more than a week since the cataclysmic events of Sept. 11. And so anything I could say about the current state of technology advertising would sound, at the very least, trivial and, at the very worse, crass and insensitive.
Right now, I am torn between two diverse sets of feelings, because, even though I live in Idaho, I spend most of my working life in New York, with my apartment just one block from St Vincent's Hospital in Greenwich Village. This hospital was expected to be at the epicenter of casualty treatment for the thousands of survivors from the twin towers disaster. But, unfortunately, as we know by now, there were very few survivors. I left New York on Monday, Sept. 10 to come back to Idaho for a couple of weeks. I sat in a cab that went within a couple of blocks of the World Trade Center, on the way to La Guardia airport, and little did I realize, as l looked up at the twin towers in the early morning sunshine, that it would be the last time I would ever see them again. Except, of course, for the thousands of times I can expect to see replays of those two airplanes smashing into those incredible skyscrapers, over the next few years.
On reflection, technology seems to have proved itself admirably in a few respects, yet failed abysmally in many more. Calling from Idaho to reach and contact friends and colleagues in New York by telephone was virtually impossible, yet, without fail, email worked like a dream.
Having said that, consider, no matter how awful it is to contemplate what your personal reaction would be, how the many people trapped on the upper floors of the World Trade Center were able to call their loved ones, and, in essence, say "goodbye." What your own reaction would be to that kind of situation is incomprehensible, but would you rather have had those final few words or no word at all?
Even worse, think about the incomparable bravery of the passengers on United Airlines Flight 93, who decided, as they were about to die, that they would not allow the hijackers to take hundreds of others with them. It was all made possible by cellular telephone technology. Not only were passengers on the flight able to tell their loved ones that they were in the middle of a hijack situation, their loved ones were able to tell them what had already transpired in New York and Washington in the last half hour. So the people on the airplane knew what the hijackers had in store, which shows the unbelievable and remarkable bravery on the part of those four, or perhaps more, passengers who decided to sacrifice themselves to save the lives of so many others on the ground.
And how did technology fail? Because we all assume technology is the answer to everything. That terrorism will come from outerspace on the back of a missile, guided by satellites with pinpoint accuracy to a landing on some defense installation in the middle of Arizona.
But it didn't happen that way. It came via a handful of people who lived among us for years, went to commercial aviation schools so they could learn to fly a giant commercial airplane straight, left or right. And then, they boarded a flying bomb (which was a jumbo jet fully fueled for a transcontinental flight) with nothing more than a couple of box-cutters hidden in shaving kits!
That's why technology failed us. Because we expect it, through sophisticated listening devices and preemptive screening systems to warn us of the possible dangers out there. We also expect the $5.50-an-hour people manning the airport baggage checks to know the difference between a stick deodorant and a box-cutter on a cheap, fuzzy X-ray device. All because the airlines and airports don't want to pay the costs of doing it right. Because they know it would add a couple of bucks to the price of our ticket, a change that we'd all bitch and moan about. And, even worse, because we don't want the inconvenience of not being able to get to an airport and board the airplane within 20 minutes.
That's why technology isn't the answer to all our ills. Technology is merely a significant part of the toolkit we have at our disposal to do good––or evil.
But then again, so is a box-cutter.
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R.I.P.
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