Yesterday's bombings will soon be invoked to service agendas across the political spectrum. They make evident, we will hear, that austerity endangers our safety, that gun control measures are a folly, that Muslims are dangerous, that our foreign policy isn't working.
I spent a lot of time yesterday sitting in front of my computer, scavenging for updates, and constantly refreshing the Twitter account of every Boston-area news outlet I could think of. And I was struck by how different this experience was from the last time a terrorist attack brought a major American city to a standstill.
On 9/11, my overwhelming feeling was one of ignorance. My teachers refused to share what little information they had, and, later on, updates seemed to dribble in through confused network television reports and a sporadic series of hysterical landline telephone calls. The iconic image of the burning Twin Towers, as gut wrenching as it is, also feels detached, almost clinical. An aerial shot from many miles away, it doesn't capture the unimaginable horrors that were unfolding within the collapsing buildings.
Yesterday was very different, and not just because I'm 21 instead of 10 or because the scope of this tragedy is narrower. This time, I was overwhelmed by the amount of available information and the frequency of the updates. It was impossible to read a report on the police investigation or the revised casualty figures without also confronting breathtakingly personal photographs of the carnage: the blood-stained sidewalks of Boylston Street, the terrified faces of spectators fleeing the chaos, runners covering their ears at the moment of the blast. On the Internet, a terrorist attack unfolded virtually in real time.
Twitter allows journalists to disseminate rumors before they've had time to vet them properly. Many outlets used discretion: The Boston Globe, CNN, The New York Times, and a number of other mainstream sources refrained from reporting on rumor and conjecture. But as long as anyone with an audience is willing to give credence to unsubstantiated reports, social media will make sure the rumors reach as many ears as possible.
Helping in the immediate, chaotic aftermath of a tragedy is not easy, but we all desperately want to contribute something, to appropriate some degree of control over the uncontrollable. Unless you're a first responder, a political leader or a journalist, your role yesterday was mainly to sit helplessly in front of a computer, as I did, and refresh your browser. The most significant contribution most of us can manage is to use social media to spread the information we have to as many people as we can.
In many ways, that's a good thing. People used Facebook and Twitter to post information about runners who hadn't been accounted for, stoppages in mobile service and potential safety threats. But they also posted a number of reports that later turned out to be false. We were led to believe that 12 victims were confirmed dead when the death toll, as of press time, was just three, and that a "Saudi national" was being questioned as a suspect, when the Boston Police Department was still strongly denying that such a suspect existed.
Misinformation doesn't disappear when the offending Tweet is taken down or when a website issues a correction. It persists, and it feeds the endless cycle of politicizing that follows every tragedy. Race-baiting will only beget more race-baiting, because people will feel like they're helping by passing along fabrication that they believe, or want to believe, is credible. Like yesterday's horror, the blame for this attack will unfold online in the blink of an eye.
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Craig Frucht is a senior majoring in psychology and political science. He can be reached at Craig.Frucht@tufts.edu.
