ZD Net blogger Jason Perlow alerted The Cable Gamer to a new show, featuring a new kind of history, coming this Thursday from The History Channel. Perlow calls it "mesh reporting," and that's a term that's likely to stick.
THC is presenting "102 Minutes that Changed America/Witness to 9/11," which the channel describes as:
Discover rarely seen and heard archives that document the 102 minutes between the first attack on the World Trade Center to the collapse of the second tower. This commercial-free special uses unique material from sources ranging from amateur photography and video to FDNY, NYPD, Port Authority and emergency dispatch radio recordings, photography and video. Also seen is footage broadcast outside the US, electronic messages and voicemails and "outtakes" culled from raw network footage. Then, watch interviews with individuals who provided videos of the events of that day. The interviews with the filmmakers will provide context for the circumstances they were in, why they shot video, what the footage means to them, and where they were on that day.
ZDNet's Perlow adds:
There have been numerous documentaries and specials about 9/11, but none of them have been as gripping and frightening as this one. Why? Because this show was produced using video sources from real people that were on the scene at the time, shooting as it was happening, and with material that hasn’t been seen before, in all its graphic and horrifying detail.
Over the span of 102 minutes, the video clips are shown in sequential fashion as the events actually happened. It is absolutely disturbing and horrifying, in an almost surreal — or “super real” fashion. If we didn’t all know 9/11 actually occurred, it almost seems like a faux-reality first-person documentary along the lines of “Cloverfield“. The editing and first rate source material results in an incredibly disturbing but beautifully preserved historical record, something that everyone should be forced to see in the coming decades, especially for those that will only know of the attacks like people of my generation know of the Hindenburg, Pearl Harbor or the liberation of Auschwitz through old movies, if only to understand the full significance of the events and feel the sadness and the true horror of what happened.
And then Perlow adds some useful technical insight:
That a program like “102 Minutes” could be produced in this day in age is an testament to the fact that more an more amateurs are able to be used as ad-hoc reporters due to the prevalence of VGA-quality or better video-record mode on cheap digital cameras and increasingly better resolution on cell phone cameras, not to mention that camcorders themselves are now smaller and smaller than ever.
What’s amazing is that all this source material for this special used 2001-era technology. God forbid, but if an event like this was to happen again, the amount of documentation we would have now from people in the field would be incredible. This with the combination of 3G wireless HSDPA and WiMax technology that is now emerging will allow a news network to potentially have THOUSANDS of cameras and data sources, in a term I would like to call “Mesh Reporting”.
And so other events will get covered like this. Hopefully not as sad as 9-11.
