Even on 9/11, the Medium Was the Message

I was still in bed.  I received a call from a friend.  I turned on the television.  I didn't turn it off for seven hours.  And 9/11 bothered me for weeks.

It also interrupted my working life in a way that made me feel both remorseful and sheepish.  I was writing a novel at the time.  The novel was about the then-nascent phenomenon in America of reality television, which I hated.  I was well over 100 pages into it, in fact, at the time of 9/11. 

But as I processed the events of 9/11 over the course of the next few weeks, I gave up my notion entirely.  After all, I was writing a comic novel, laden with satire, and America itself was laden with tragedy and gravitas.

A few weeks later, I spoke to a loose acquaintance of mine and confessed that I was disappointed to not be writing my novel anymore.  This was but one of many selfish responses I had to the events of September 11, 2001, but it was the first one I confessed to publicly.

My acquaintance said to me:

“Just write it anyway.  Write 9/11 right into it.  Look, it’s just television.  We should make things up about it.  It makes things up about us all the time.  If 9/11 hasn’t proven that, nothing will.”

I found that sage counsel, but in subsequent years, I still wrestled with it.  There could be no such thing as a feel-good novel about 9/11, nor even a satirical novel about 9/11, and certainly not a trivializing novel about 9/11.  But as I came to understand 9/11 as not only a tragedy but also as a kind of last stand for television, I could piece the work together as a novel about the shared experience of national trauma on this increasingly irksome media.

My novel debuted in 2005.  It would be wrong for me to think anyone was ready for it, because I wasn't ready for it myself.  I re-released it on Kindle a week ago, in conjunction with the tenth anniversary of the event and media climate it documents.

And ten years later, media and especially television are still trying to impose on us a shared national narrative of what happened to us.  Ten years later, while we are solemnly acknowledging the tenth anniversary of the greatest crime ever against America, we are also commemorating is the tenth anniversary of the death of meaningful shared media experience.

This is where I believe media, including interactive media but especially television, began to go wrong soon after 9/11, and where they still go wrong today: they are ceaselessly trying to impose artificial narratives on its viewer-listener-reader clients, the way reality television does, for the sake of re-establishing media’s own importance in our lives.

We're not like the way we were on 9/11 anymore.  What we share is difference, and many of us share an attendant repugnance for being herded by media.  When we tun in, we're tuning in to increasingly trivial shows and increasingly artificial narratives.

There were, on September 11, 2001, 280 million Americans.  Of these, about 10 million in the New York and Washington metropolitan areas had a direct experience of this crime against American humanity, including those who suffered loss directly. 

Which means that 270 million—over 96% of us—of us experienced 9/11 purely through media, especially television.

To the degree that we shared anything beyond outrage and grief on 9/11, it was this: we were all watching a particular medium, television, which was, like phosphorous, shining most brightly and insistently at the precise moment it was about to die (the phrase is Roland Barthes' on the trick of literature). 

From that point forward, television's primary ambition has been to herd us all together—for American Idols and Iron Chefs and Super Bowls and dream houses and other would-be shared national events—even as many, and perhaps most, of us instinctively turn to other kind of media that make us feel less herded, and on more individualized roads.

The characters in my novel all become paranoid in the wake of 9/11, paranoid to the degree that they feel a need to change their lives, not because of something that has happened to them directly, but because of something they watched on television.  And I suspect this was the experience of many throughout the country after 9/11.

That single idea—the idea that as television becomes more insistent on driving artificially constructive narratives that are supposed to be relevant to our lives, it does us an increasing disservice—became the whole didactic point of my novel; and that idea has most informed my own interpretation of the “post 9/11 world.”