Too clever by half

The decision by The Guardian newspaper to suspend its dedicated Twitter feed retelling the events of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US shows how we’re still finding our feet with new communications technology.

On the tenth anniversary of the attacks, the Guardian set up the @911tenyearsago account which retold the events in real time as they happened ten years previously, starting with “Mohamed Atta and Abdulaziz al-Omari board American Airlines Flight 11 at Boston Logan airport” and continuing as that and other flights take off, and goes on to show how news filtered through that something was wrong.

It got as far as “George Bush – preparing to meet children at a Florida elementary school – is told an aircraft has struck the World Trade Center” before, just 16 Tweets in, it announces bluntly. “This account of the events is now ending.”

The decision to stop the feed appeared to be a result of some of the replies to the Guardian’s Tweets which included calling it a “sick sideshow”, “tacky” and “grotesque”.

Like so many bad ideas, it was actually based on good intentions and innovative thinking, typical of the newspaper’s approach to using new technology alongside traditional print.

Similar ideas can work quite well in other media – repeated real-time television footage can be instructive as it reminds us how news anchors struggled to cover the story because they so obviously in shock.

And the Guardian itself reprinted commentary articles that were written in the immediate aftermath which help to show how ten years of hindsight compare with the raw emotions of the time.

But the same trick won’t work with Twitter for several reasons. First of all, it isn’t genuine. The contemporary reporting is part of the history of 9/11 and when we watch it or read it, we are taken back to 2001, either because we remember consuming that media at the time, or just because we know we are looking at a historical document and we can put it in context.

But Twitter didn’t exist in 2001 and so the Guardian had to create the updates from a 2011 perspective.

Secondly, ten years isn’t very long ago (it doesn’t even look very different, unlike the contrast between 1973 and 1963, or 1995 and 1985).

For those who lost someone in the attacks, the emotions are still very raw. But even for those fortunate enough – like myself – not to have been directly affected, it still seems fairly recent and so the account seems a little – as another Twitterer put it – “perverse”.

So it was too long ago, and yet too recent.

In communications terms, the Guardian was guilty of one of the most common errors – broadcasting the message that it wanted to say, without considering how it would be heard by its audience.