Photography and Surveillance Posting

This topic is interesting and relevant to today's mass mediated society, particularly in light of Monday's bombing in Boston and the images, videos and audio that were collected by the media and average citizens and are now being used by the government to help pieces the events together. The readers, particularly Karen Beckman's article and its comments on the visuals of war and how it is often used to question wars and torture and draw attention to atrocities, got me thinking about all of the images of September 11th and the extreme support from the American people at the beginning of the Afghan invasion and the "War on Terror" that is still going on today, 12 years later. Acts of terror like September 11th, the Marathon Bombings and Pearl Harbor strike the general population differently because they are so random and there is so much opportunity for any average person going about their daily business to be caught up in them, and they are made that much scarier and that much more real when they are seen, not only read about or reported about. To that extent, I the events of September 11th had not happened in the 21st century, if they had happened a half century earlier when there were no television helicopters, cell phone cameras or "citizen journalism," if the images of  September 11th that are now symbols in our minds as much as they are part of a historical event - planes hitting buildings, two tall smoking buildings, two sky scrapers crumbling into our most prized city - if it had just been a story on the news and photos of just the aftermath, would Americans have reacted so strongly? Yes, we would have gone to war and we would mourn the victims, but would American citizens in the Midwest be experiencing post traumatic stress disorder like they did? Would the international community have rallied around us to the extent that they did? I would argue that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are similarly devastating national attacks, and while they were war time attacks that were the result of the attack on Pearl Harbor, there is not live coverage of the incident as it unfolded that was broadcast around the world. If there had been, I would argue that there would have been a similar international fall out like there was for 9/11. In thinking about all of this, I found it interesting that the argument can be made that photos can act to take away support for war and at the same time bring more people into a devastating event, cause more trauma, and rally up more support for war efforts.