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Russell Mickler, Principal Consultant, has over 17 years of professional experience leading and managing IT organizations.
The Mirror of Erised
Written on September 11, 2006
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I’m a news junkie and I’ll be the first to admit that I’m hooked on CNN’s Pipeline service. Pipeline allows for four video channels of nonstop news to be delivered to my desktop 24/7.
On Sept. 11, Pipeline ran (and has been airing) the 9/11 events as they happened – chronologically – on one of the channels. This allows you to relive the moments as they happened, in the midst of chaos, confusion, and destruction. In a morbid way, we can observe the speculative news commentary now with 20×20 vision: we’re watching a movie we’ve seen before. We know the plot, the weapon, the suspects by heart. The terror is predictable. We wait for our favorite scenes.
I’m reminded of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series and the Mirror of Erised. Not to give too much away if you haven’t read the book, the mirror allows Harry to view his greatest dreams and wishes – a fantasy wherein the mirror’s watcher can go mad. Harry spends too long in front of the Mirror to be with his dead parents; it only through accepting the present does Harry pull himself away from it.
Right now, Pipeline is our Mirror. How we use this technology to gaze the events of that day and relive the moments, segment by segment; our greatest wish maybe we expect the outcomes to be different. Maybe if we can replay it enough, maybe we’ll catch something we didn’t experience before. Maybe another scrap of evidence, another piece of understanding… to explain and understand. Ultimately, even though we’ve got the technology to relive this and broadcast it all over the world, somehow, we must pull ourselves away from the Mirror to deal with the present.
I wonder how new technology and invention will allow us to record our lives and subsequently relive its most painful moments? In our future, technology might force us to revisit the past – over and over again – preventing our usual momentum to accept and push forward. Hopefully we will have the courage to close the past even though we’ve the capability to relive it.
Russell Mickler, MCSE | CISSP says:
Commented posted on: September 11, 2006
Thank you – it’s odd to revisit that day in the context _of_ the day; I guess I’ve grown accustomed to viewing the events from a distance, or, as a compartmentalized concept. Reliving it through Pipeline today kinda gave me a sense of the heebie-jeebies…. (grin)…
Cynthia Samuels says:
Commented posted on: September 11, 2006
What a great metaphor! I just had a conversation on a journalism list with someone who thinks this is all too much. I used allusions to “first drafts of history” etc but yours is so so so much better. yay.