The Internet Under Crisis Conditions Learning from September 11 (2003) / Chapter Skim
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3 The User Experience
3 The User Experience
Pages 40-48
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From page 40... ...
equipment in place there, were completely destroyed. Other companies located near the World Trade Center, such as Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers Holdings, Inc., also could be categorized as "headquarters rendered unusable"; and a great deal of additional space in the areas abutting Ground Zero was rendered either temporarily or permanently out of commission.
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From page 41... ...
For example, the director of infrastructure at Blackwood Trading LLC was quoted as saying that "if he hadn't seen the attack, he wouldn't have known it happened." Blackwood was relatively well prepared for such a disaster: while its data center is housed on Wall Street, the firm backs up all its trade data to remote centers in New Jersey, which is on a separate power grid; it was able to execute more than a "half-million trades before the NASDAQ voluntarily shut down," according to that executive.4 Indeed, data loss was less of a problem than one might think. Most large Wall Street firms had responded to the earlier World Trade Center bombing (in 1993)
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From page 42... ...
Together, these data provide a very telling portrait of what people wanted, needed, and expected from the Internet in those extraordinary circumstances. The Internet as a Source of News Many people learned of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon while they were at work or on their way to work.8 And because people often do not have access to television sets at their place of work, there is reason to believe that they then turned to Internet news sites for information.
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Another possible reason was frustration with the Internet: 43 percent of Internet users reported at least some trouble accessing Web sites in the first hours after the attacks, and 15 percent reported great difficulties.l° Yet another possible reason is that news organizations generally do not provide live streaming video programming.ll In the end, about a fifth of those who had difficulty reaching a site gave up on using the Internet for news during that period.l2 Another important point is that many people appear to have used the Internet not as a replacement for regular news sources but as a supplement. Major search engines reported that the information sought by users changed dramatically on September 11 and in the following days.
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Available online at < http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist/9-11-search.html>.
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From page 45... ...
Although the Internet was one medium by which people chose to communicate, it is important to emphasize that the preferred mode of personal communications was the telephone. Indeed, even heavy Internet users reported using the telephone more than the Internet (and at a higher rate than the national average)
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CN = 525; margin of error is +6 percent. SOURCE: Lee Raime and Bente Kalsnes.
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Much of the communication was through e-mail, which was used almost as soon as the attacks began, though a modest fraction of Internet users (13 percent) reported using instant messages.l6 Anecdotal reports both from Washington, D.C., and New York City suggest that instant messaging proved a viable alternative for office workers who were unable to use their phones but still had Internet access.
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From page 48... ...
The decrease in overall demand is apparent in both the Pew Internet users survey data and in reports of ISPs, including presenters at the workshop.
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