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The Fall of Afghanistan Can’t Hide from Social Media
The world is watching the stunning events unfolding in Kabul through a lens that didn’t exist in 2001.
On September 11, 2001, the Internet was well-established, as was real-time communication between friends and family, much of it conducted on private systems like America Online’s Instant Messenger (AOL IM).
There were, however, no widely used digital gathering places. AOL’s Discussion boards and even the Bulletin boards that preceded it did not have the social and cultural weight of modern social media.
What we knew of that tragic day and its aftermath came largely through news media reports. It was the same with the war in Afghanistan, an already by then decades-old civil war that we knew little of until America launched an assault to find those responsible for the 9–11 attacks, terrorists who were being harbored by the Taliban in Afghanistan.
There was, as I recall, virtually no on-the-ground civilian news reporting, to say nothing of video and photos coming from citizens. We learned slowly, at the time, about Sharia law and its brutal treatment of women.
Contrast this with the last 72 hours as, well ahead of comprehensive news reports, we’ve watched the real-time collapse of the…
