On September 11th, as thousands of New Yorkers died in their offices, millions of office workers without access to TV screens surged onto the Internet for news of the biggest story of their lives. When a band of maniacs declare war by plunging first one, then two and finally a third plane full of passengers into the most prestigious buildings on the planet, it is a time for horror, fear, and, perhaps most crucially of all, information. What the hell is going on? Who? How bloody many? Six minutes after American Airlines flight 11 shattered the first tower of the World Trade Centre, subscribers to the SMS service of the Irish Times website, ireland.com, were alerted to the tragedy and, simultaneously, Ireland's first online report on events was posted.
The reactions of CNN.com and bbc.co.uk were equally rapid as news sites scrambled to meet unprecedented demand for their services. ireland.com received 1.7 million page impressions by midnight, RT╔ had "much more than usual" and CNN reported 9 million per hour.
The BBC, according to online editor Mike Smartt, also received intense traffic: "Tuesday saw 18 million page views, Wednesday 23 million, a record by 8 million over the last highest day, the Friday after the General Election, and Thursday 15.6 million. We are still analysing Friday and beyond because our servers went down in New York - they are inside the affected area in Manhattan and overheated so had to be turned off."
As paper printing presses hadn't even begun to roll, online editors were more aware than ever before that they had a responsibility to produce accurate information, lots of it, fast enough to make readers understand we had suddenly arrived at one of the defining points of modern human history.
Many sites simply crashed, unable to handle the sheer volume of visitors. RT╔ were forced temporarily to strip their site down to a single page with links to the one dominant story. CNN, MPSN, and BBC did the same, as did the site of French newspaper LibΘration (www.liberation.fr). By Thursday, RT╔ had installed two extra megabytes of bandwidth, and ireland.com was grateful it had stayed up and running despite the evacuation of the staff at the site one of its servers, put in place last year, just four miles north of the World Trade Centre.
In the reporting of the attacks, there was a remarkable, and understandable, uniformity across the sites of the world. No one tried to be clever or controversial with their initial headlines - all carried the bald fact that there had been an "exceptional", "unprecedented", or "historic" terrorist attack on the citizens of America.
By the end of Tuesday afternoon, the singularity (thus far at least) of the attack having become global knowledge, headlines turned to the "thousands feared dead" (ireland.com), "50,000 killed" (Sky News), "unknown number of victims" (Germany's www.welt.de). Then came the reactions. News sites attempted to use their headlines to reflect America's mood, capture the world's astonishment - "The United States stupefied" proclaimed Le Monde (www.lemonde.fr), "America in chaos" agreed LibΘration, "US under siege" added RT╔.
"The task was to keep focus, to convey what happened and what it all meant in a cohesive manner" says Deirdre Veldon, editor of ireland.com, "there was so much information coming in and so much emotion that it would have been easy to sensationalise or sow confusion".
As Sky and CNN beamed pictures of the devastation live to a staggered world, almost every news site compiled a grim gallery of photos. Contemplating photos is not the same as witnessing live footage (which CNN and Sky later made available on their websites. ireland.com also employed video footage of the attacks on its site).
The moving film is spectacular, television showed us shots of crashes whose awesome impact took our breath away, and pictures of falling humans which made us physically and spiritually ill. The rows of still images on websites did not hit so immediately, could not possibly shock us so suddenly. They were posted to make us ponder in silence, away from all the jabbering experts, to put ourselves in positions we didn't imagine anyone would ever be in, and, perhaps, to ask ourselves how the world's going to get out of it.
The sequence of reports and tones on news sites matched those unfolding on television and radio, but what was confirmed by the coverage as one of the great merits of the Internet was its capacity to present many facets at once, to be built of solid substance while proving obligingly malleable to all.
With TV, a reader interested in finding out, for example, Saddam Hussein's interpretation of events had to wait for the turn of that particular report; an Internet reader could simply skip through everything else and click on the relevant hyper-text link, where they would see not just selected soundbites but the full wording of the Iraqi leader's speech.
That is a level of depth other media, where space and time are merciless bosses, can't aspire to; in cyberspace, finite human resources are the only limitation, and coffee and a sense of duty have been known to stretch that barrier immeasurably.
The Guardian's website took the excellent initiative of providing links to reports, opinion pieces, and even cartoons from other news sites around the world, encouraging its readers to seek as wide a range of views as possible.
The BBC invited readers to put questions to its correspondents around the world, who then endeavoured to share their insights. Such interactivity represents another aspect of the Internet's enrichment of the media environment. Whether it was providing quick answers to specific questions, or allowing for the voicing of views and emotions, the web channelled a phenomenal outpouring of humanity last week. ireland.com's online poll asked the question: "Is military retaliation the right response to Tuesday's atrocities in the US?" and received 21,000 responses.
The many, many online books of condolences continue to be inundated with contributions.
pdoyle@irish-times.com