Recent events indicate that online may have finally come into its own.
The rise of online
Recent events indicate that online may have finally come into its own.
Rather than calling family and friends to grieve, people instead turned to the Internet.
When I started in this industry we were still using terms like “information superhighway”. It seems a little embarrassing to think about it now and it highlights how we really didn’t know what to expect from the Internet. There was talk of online communities but we really didn’t have any examples to use and couldn’t fathom how it would actually play out.
As is our habit, we are always looking ahead and there are still plenty of articles around that ponder what changes the Internet will bring—but this makes it easy to forget just how far we have come. A recent event brought this to my attention.
When the September 11 attacks struck we watched the events unfold on our television screens, and we couldn’t wait to get home from work the next night to watch the updates. At that time, it was all about TV. The experience of watching the footage of that second tower’s attack is not going to be forgotten any time soon.
Looking at more recent events, such as the miners that were trapped out at Beaconsfield I was surprised to discover that not much had changed. Being at work I didn’t have access to a television and I was looking to the Internet to give me updates, except that there were hardly any—I had to go to CNN to get any type of video footage! The day the miners were rescued people stayed at home to watch their television, rather than go to work.
This month we had the news of Steve Irwin’s tragic death. When the news broke we weren’t at home getting ready for bed, nor were we at home getting ready for work—we were already at work and most of us didn’t have access to a television, instead we relied on the Internet.
And it delivered.
Within half an hour of the announcement on www.news.com.au there were more than 30 comments from readers responding to the story. Not long after, the amount of comments had increased to more than a hundred, then more than five hundred. The online tributes continued to pour in—last I checked there were more than 1200 comments on that one story.
And what started out as one breaking news story soon expanded to an obituary, a timeline of his life, a series of pictures, video footage and more. Online interest about Irwin’s death was so great that some news sites weren’t prepared and suffered bandwidth issues.
Most amazing is that within minutes of the news breaking, Wikipedia’s entry for Irwin had already been updated. Indeed, the Wikipedia entry was what some news sites used as the obituary, (which is a mark for the legitimacy of the community site which has been lambasted for this in the past). Other community sites such as Digg also responded to the news immediately.
What struck me is that rather than calling family and friends to grieve, people instead turned to the Internet. By the time I got home that night I had missed the evening news, and anything I saw on the late news I had already read or seen on the Internet earlier that day. In this instance, television wasn’t king.
At a time when we have had two cover stories on improving websites within four months, it served as a good reminder, albeit in tragic circumstances, of just how important the Internet has become, both to businesses and personal communities.
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