Everything has changed.
There was a more innocent time, little more than 48 hours ago, when this phrase was hyperbole. It was shorthand for a debate about whether Internet technology had ushered in a new economic era, an age in which high-speed networks transform the way we do business.
There’s no longer any question that everything has changed, but the debate is no longer about technology.
Our national psyche changed the instant terrorists crashed the first of four planes that killed thousands Tuesday, deepening our sense of vulnerability and altering our relationships to the world in ways we don’t fully understand.
Everything has changed, and the little packets of data that continue to convey our voices and written messages around the globe are helping us come to grips with how our world is different.
We listen to chilling reports of cell phone calls from survivors in New York’s World Trade Center rubble and pray that rescuers find them. Online, we pull up stark black-and-white Web pages like the message posted on Aon Corp.’s site, offering hotline numbers for employees and clients.
We e-mail friends and relatives.
“Are you all right?” David Siegel, a database programmer in Chicago, queried in an e-mail to a childhood buddy in New York. “I hope you weren’t near the WTC. I hope you’re OK.”
His friend is fine.
When phones failed, e-mails offered more than quick reassurance. They carried moving accounts not only of terror and tragedy but of resourcefulness, courage and kindness.
They allowed senders to spill out their grief and fear. They bought peace of mind to loved ones.
David Ormesher, CEO of digital design firm Closerlook in Chicago, e-mailed his siblings all day Tuesday, trying to locate their adopted brother, Soonkyu Shin, a financial analyst who works four block from the World Trade Center’s towers.
It wasn’t until evening that Ormesher got his first e-mail from Shin.
“I still feel as if I am in a dream,” Shin wrote after a four-hour journey from lower Manhattan to his home in Riverdale in the Bronx. Shin, who is blind, was making a presentation to portfolio managers when the attacks occurred–in plain view of his distracted colleagues.
“I will never forget the scream of my co-workers when they saw the second tower collapsing,” his e-mail said.
“We walked, like refugees running away from a battlefield. Someone ripped up their company T-shirt and made several masks for us to hold in front of our faces. … Business owners along the way offered us cold water, snacks, wet paper towels.”
Ninety minutes later, Shin reached midtown Manhattan, where his wife works.
“All I could think was that I wanted to die with her [if the attacks continued]. We are still afraid. … Pray for those who lost loved ones. … Pray for us who are still afraid!”
George Garrick, CEO of Silicon Valley’s YY Software Corp., stepped off an Amtrak train in Chicago on Wednesday after fleeing Washington in a four-hour taxi ride to Pittsburgh.
When terrorists slammed a plane into the Pentagon, Garrick was in a hotel two blocks from the Capitol, preparing remarks for a meeting with 30 Democratic senators on technology issues.
The meeting was canceled soon after it started, but Garrick and others had little choice but to stand helpless around a hotel lobby television while sirens wailed, military jets roared and helicopters clattered overhead.
He was headed on foot to find a rental car when he managed to hail a taxi and persuade the driver to head west. Outside Washington, where wireless circuits were less jammed, he used his two cell phones to make travel plans, booking an Amtrak train from Pittsburgh. The train left three hours late, at 2:30 a.m. Wednesday.
He called his family in Chicago every 30 minutes en route to Pennsylvania. “My biggest fear was not being able to come home to my kids,” he said. “The concept that there are thousands of people who aren’t going home to their children is unbelievably horrific.”
For all of us, everything has changed.
