Imagine if 9/11 happened today?

Obviously, the first thing that would go off is your phone. Dependant on your age, you'll have your favourite app that you jump on after you see the first 20 characters of the notification. It's your choice in app that will define the information you get - and that's important.

"A plane has flown into one of the Towers in New York City. We have reason to believe this is a terrorist event"

...explains the reporter via a live feed that sits parallel to a tacky ad on "how this cream turned a 50-year old woman young again".

Of course, no one currently has any evidence to believe it's a terrorist attack, but the general population is already pointing fingers at the latest terrorist outfit (who will take that credit regardless).

A few minutes later, your feeds are absolutely swamped with very graphic, but high quality, well taken images thanks to the latest 4k smartphone camera.

You jump on Facebook and see a live video that appears to be at the location. The man on the other end isn't running away, he's staying put and filming the surroundings from the streets of New York, emotionally urged on by the thousands of comments and emojis popping up at the bottom of the screen.

You over hear your colleague talk about a Twitter user who has just gone Live. It's a woman in her office on the 52nd floor of Tower 1. You tune in to this for a closer look. A few moments later, white noise, chaos and a disconnection. Both Towers are hit.

As the fear and anxiety sets in, the corner of your phone fills with notifications from friends who only add to the influx of information. Because you trust these people, their opinions begin to sway your own.

Even though you are literally a world away, you begin to fear for your own safety because John said his Uber driver saw a post on Reddit that "a plane just made a u-turn towards your city".

As the event continues to unfold, so too does social media. After all, it's the 21st century and everything is accredited by the knife edge of social media. There are now rumours that the terrorists were able to film a message from the plane moments before impact. Due to the innovative wifi on the plane, it is somewhere online - Mark Zuckerberg orders his content editors to find it.

Conspiracy theorists seem to disown their beloved anti-vax / covid-hoax Facebook groups and head to new communities; groups with a banner picture of the Towers and Joe Biden's face in red, somehow they're convinced this is an "inside job". Due to emotion, you notice that some of your family members are part of those groups, that's worrying.

Just before you decide you need some away time from the screen, you get an invite to a fundraising page created by an influencer. She's found time from here Barbados Airbnb to set up a link you can donate to - the legitimacy of that link is questionable.

That night, Al-Qaida send a homemade video via their new Apple iPhones they bought with the bribe money CIA investigators handed out to war lords. The video goes straight into the Twitter-sphere. Before the U.S. Government can get hold of it, it's already on Fox News being dissected by Tucker Carlson.

It's not all bad though.

Of course there are positives to this technology.

In fact, in a recent Netflix documentary on the rise of social media, CIA agents admit how valuable Facebook has become to them - assisting in tracking offenders in half the time. And a similar story of how smartphone photos of the Boston Marathon bombings helped investigators in finding the culprits.

Perhaps if such technology existed in 2001, they would have caught the offenders before it happened?

These platforms and an increasingly connected world means there are fewer places to hide. It means that puzzles can be put together in half the time, and often by anyone (see Don't F*ck with Cats on Netflix).

The killing of George Floyd in May of 2020 sparked a global movement. A smartphone captured an event that encouraged people to step up and order change.

On March 15th, 2019, a terrorist successfully live streamed his attack on innocent people in Christchurch City, New Zealand. The ability for him to do this and for it to remain on the platform for half an hour meant Mark Zuckerberg would find himself in front of congress (again) explaining his platform's influence and accountability.

But it makes you think...

Many of the above fictional events did happen in 2001, albeit at a slower pace. But today, we must ask ourselves a few questions given the era we live in:

• Where am I getting this information from?
• Is it credible and do I trust it?
• What can I label as an assumption? What is fact?
• Could I use the technology in my pocket to help instead of spread false information?
• Do I really trust 'Karen', a connection to the mother of an old receptionist I used to know?

As a civilisation with access to such mediums and technology, we must be careful about the access people have to our opinions, and what they do with them.

If 9/11 happened today, it would be a completely different experience, perhaps better, perhaps worse. But it would be a different breed of people living through it than in 2001, and that's something to consider as we embrace more technology.