My Most Memorable Mediated Experience: September 11

In 2001, I was a high school student in Japan, and I was at home with my family. We finished dinner and we were watching sitcom as we always do. All the sudden, the channel turned into something else, and the newscaster started talking with the very shocked face. My most memorable mediated experience was September 11. We had no choice if we wanted to watch it or not, all the channels were broadcasting the same image over and over. In the air, the big airplane crashed into the one of the most outstanding buildings in the world, and it exploded. On the ground people looked up the crash, and couldn't say a word. Soon, we heard sirens and people screaming. Firefighters were trying to rescue those people. We thought it was not real. We thought it was a bad joke that was not even funny. People were jumping off from the building, and the sound was very strong that it still stays in my head. After the first explosion, the second one came, and media clearly captured the moment with almost entire media audiences. That media exposure was seen as the end of the world even adults could not believe it was real. I remember my five-year-old nephew did not know what to do after he saw so many people suffering on TV, and he cried and cried for the whole night. He was not able to react to the big event happening around him, and the only thing he was able to do was to keep crying and to make somebody stay with him anytime. It was beyond our imagination that how media can influence us with the visual image. Nothing would be as real as the reality, but the impact that media brought us was very big. Also, I felt disappointed and powerless that I could not think of any idea of what I could do to help those people even though we watch TV to follow what was going on with remote viewing.