July 07, 2005

London calling

It sounds like all the people I know of in London are OK. I'm trying not to feel too relieved, reminding myself that that means the people someone else knows in London are not OK.

I rowed this morning, which meant I heard the news on the car radio at 4:30 AM. That's a horrible and appropriate time to be blindsided by news of tragedy. My first thought was of Ruthie, then I started running down a mental list of UK pifflers, trying to remember who is and isn't in London. Three and a half hours later when I got to work, most of those people had checked in. So I had a bit of relief until I remembered that M'ris is in London right now. Within an hour, though, Timprov had heard and posted that she, Mark, and their party are unhurt.

The first time I remember the Internet being used to report and check in disaster must have been about 1986, when there was a big earthquake in California (LA?). That was before the World Wide Web, but newsgroups were very active and one was set up that day for people there to check in and others to ask if someone had been seen and was OK. I knew then - I'm not prescient; it was obvious - that something had changed in the nature of communities and in how people talked to and cared for each other.

Today a community has been set up on LiveJournal set up just for Londoners to check in, and a list of those LJers who are known to be unhurt. I'm sure other web communities have done the same. People are talking about who's there, who might be hurt, who has checked in.

Funny thing: nobody I know only from physical meetings is in London now (to my knowledge). I'm grateful to the Internet for providing a means for me to hear that everyone there I care about is OK. But everyone there that I care about, is a person I've met online in the first place. I'm grateful for that, too.

Posted by dichroic at July 7, 2005 01:52 PM
Comments

My mom sent me your link because we're (on the IAM.bmezine.com blog) still waiting for checkins.
Now I know how my friends who aren't on the East Coast of the US felt on 9/11/2001.

Posted by: L-Empress's UD at July 7, 2005 02:49 PM
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