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Do rolling news and social media intensify reactions?
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On 18th February 1991 two bombs went off in London. One, at Paddington Station, only damaged the roof. The other, at Victoria Station, killed one person, and injured 38 more, two of them critically. All London Stations and airports were closed, stranding 470,000 commuters.
The thing is (and to use a cliche, it might just be me) I don't remember it. Even though I was living in London in 1991 (but was obviously not one of the stranded commuters) I just have no memory of that day. The IRA did plant hundreds of bombs, most of them small and inconsequential, so it might just have got lost in the mass. But still, it was a pretty big deal. Imagine if Al Qaeda planted two bombs in London tomorrow, causing that level of disruption and that number of casualties.
Obviously it did get press attention - I have just been reading the articles. But it all sounds so ordinary. It made me wonder whether that kind of bomb just didn't make much impact - there were no 24 hour news channels, no twitter, no facebook, no blogs - and certainly didn't lead to 'outpourings' of anything in particular.
The thing is (and to use a cliche, it might just be me) I don't remember it. Even though I was living in London in 1991 (but was obviously not one of the stranded commuters) I just have no memory of that day. The IRA did plant hundreds of bombs, most of them small and inconsequential, so it might just have got lost in the mass. But still, it was a pretty big deal. Imagine if Al Qaeda planted two bombs in London tomorrow, causing that level of disruption and that number of casualties.
Obviously it did get press attention - I have just been reading the articles. But it all sounds so ordinary. It made me wonder whether that kind of bomb just didn't make much impact - there were no 24 hour news channels, no twitter, no facebook, no blogs - and certainly didn't lead to 'outpourings' of anything in particular.
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There are massacres going on all over the world, especially Africa, but we never hear about it on the mainstream news and (in my case) Twitter trends, so I don't react to it.
Looking at the timeline from 1992 alone I never realised there were that many bombs planted by the IRA. That year there were 37 bombs planted.
Yes, seems amazing now. And they had a policy of causing maximum disruption with hoaxes. I don't think I sat a single A level paper that wasn't interrupted by 'a bomb scare': we would troop out in silence to the tennis courts, a PC would come and have a potter about, then we would troop back in. And there was a time when shopping in central london always seemed to involve long periods standing behind tape waiting for the 'bomb scare' to be over.
As pointed out 37 bombs in year by the IRA the one I recall the most was the Docklands bombing with the images of all the glass blown out of the skyscrapers for miles around. Sure you scared about but you just got on with life. It is odd to say it become normal it is not quite true but you blocked it out.
you hear some people today talking as if this is the end of the world god knows how they would have lived through the cold war.
I think one of the main differences is the media today makes it seem more personal. The news reporting in the past was very much matter of fact. Today they go more into the details, explaining why the and how digging into their background what they had to eatc on the day etc.
It makes you feel at times if you were at the location and it was happening to you rather what we saw in 1980's / 90's was at a distance. Happing more to other people than something you could picture on your doorstep.
In the car one day I had to call Directory Enquiries.
I spoke to a girl with a Northern Ireland accent.
In the midst of the conversation I heard a very dull thud in the background and she verbally flinched.
I asked "What was that?"
She replied "A bomb".
I asked "Where are you?" And the reply was "Belfast".
I asked if she was ok and she said "Oh yes, it's a few streets away"
Later I remember thinking "They just live through that?"
It had a brief mention on the news that night.
Edit:
When driving you had to be parked to make a call because they were so cumbersome and signals varied by the hour.
Rolling news has always been rather laughable and cartoonish. No one needs the same information drummed in a million times over. People filming EVERYthing on their phones. There was some sort of car pile up recently, people filming a woman escaping the wreckage. Why not put down your bleeding phone and go help. I wouldn't be too pleased to be filmed if I've just had a truck smash into the back of me.
Now it is instantaneous , which in one respect is good in another it can be misinformation as we saw with J.C De Menezes we got a lot of misinformation by reporters on the spot describing what witnesses told them and police that they saw a man vaulting the barrier , someone else who had been on the tube train said on BBC news they saw wires coming out of his rucksack ( a complete fabrication or panic and shock who knows on that one) the press pushed so hard for instant responses that the police issued a statement using witness statements, which later turned out to be wrong, yes they saw a man jump the barrier but it was not the so called "suspect" it was a policeman running down to the tube . If they had dared to wait a little longer we would not have had such misinformation or a tabloid running with " One down three to go", the media want too much too soon and to me I would rather get the basics of what has happened with facts coming later as accurate information .
As for social media, excellent at times but also a melting pot of armchair detectives and so called vigilantes who can cause a lot of trouble from nothing or whip up a minor indiscretion into a national frenzy within minutes.
There was a classic on the CNN coverage of the AirAsia crash. Someone obviously remembered all the stuff they had about the MH370 search, so they wheeled out their footage of experts talking endlessly about deep-sea recovery, and unmanned underwater vehicles which could reach amazing depths. In the meantime, they were also reporting that the Java Sea is only about 100 feet deep so any wreckage could be reached by divers, without the need for unmanned underwater vehicles which could reach amazing depths!
There also seems to be a lot more pressure on those dealing with any incident to say something ! "We're still trying to determine what happened" just doesn't seem to cut it as all the news outlets have to find some angle about which to speculate! All too often the result is that one person will say one thing, and another person will say something different, so the viewer is actually none the wiser.
And then the conspiracy theories start