Hawai'i Tech
Web comes up short during crisis

By Vicki Viotti
Advertiser Staff Writer

When the initial shock abated and the world began to take stock of what had happened a week ago today, the reviews began to roll in.

Print out this ribbon and wear it to show your solidarity with others affected by Tuesday's tragedy.

For the present, the answer has to be no. News Web sites locked up, some of them posting all-text pages so that they'd load faster in computers waiting on the cyberlines. So much for the multimedia Web.

This frustrated people like Phil Sharp, president of the Hawai'i PC Users Group, who on Wednesday posted a text-only informational roundup page, including important phone numbers and lists of what's open or closed, at the club's Web site.The page had about 350 hits in 48 hours, he said.

This is how the Web should function at times of crisis, Sharp said: with concise information, not "whirling and twirling" graphics and ads.

"The Web has been turned into nothing but a big advertisement," the Kaka'ako resident said. "If you want information, you need it fast and you need it dependable, you cannot trust the media to do it. There was no centralized, concise clearinghouse. Information has taken a back seat to advertisements and glitz."

If the conventional media sites took a hit for their information-delivery failure, other Net neighborhoods are sporting a black eye, too. Hoax survivor lists, hoax Nostradamus prophecies ... it's impossible to take anything on the Web at face value.

But if nothing else, the Internet is a two-way communications medium over which everyone had some influence, for good or ill. If in its news-disseminating function the Net fell short, it came through admirably in keeping family connected.

Marisa Wu, a Punahou graduate and George Washington University senior, despaired at getting a phone connection to tell her family that she was out of danger from the attack on the nation's capital.

"I got on the Internet and on my Instant Messenger, but all my friends who were online were in Washington, D.C., too, and they couldn't get a phone line, either," Wu said. "But then I saw the name of one of my friends in San Francisco pop up, and I messaged her and asked her to call my mom."

The Net served a third function in this crisis as well: helping people to make sense of it. In some cases, "making sense" translated into "making money."

Ebay.com site managers at first purged sale items that seemed to capitalize on tragedy, they crept back over the days that followed. One item was a World Trade Center in-memoriam T-shirt, with bids starting at $20. The first $10 would go to the United Way Sept. 11 Fund, the seller pledged.

More often, however, the Internet provided a means for people to reclaim some measure of power over events. There were e-mails urging recipients to light candles at specific times, messages calling on citizens to buy stock when the market reopened yesterday, as a demonstration of solidarity.

New discussion groups were formed on Usenet, the "newsgroup" sector of the Internet. One of them contains a measure of self-serving advertisements but remained largely a forum for discussing the developments in the characteristically boisterous Usenet style.

Elsewhere, The Advertiser's own discussion board contained some two dozen "threads" (related postings from site visitors) on the terrorist theme. The About.com site's Hawai'i section included its own "Second Day of Infamy" forum.

But there have been are highly individualized gestures online, too. Robert "Rabbett" Abbett, longtime Hawai'i radio personality best known recently for his Internet Radio Hawaii site designed a black ribbon inscribed with the date of the disaster and posted it on his site. He invited everyone to post it on their own Web sites.

It's not much, he said, but at least the Web has given him the capability to do this much.

A tragedy like this needs a symbol," he said. "This seemed appropriate."

Inspiration struck during the wee hours Tuesday night, Abbett said, after exchanging thoughts with Net radio listeners who were using the station "to get their sanity back." So he sent out the image on his listener e-mail list.

"There's not a lot we can do," Abbett said. "We can just try to remember these people."