Although 2001 doesn't seem too long ago, most people didn't have cell phones still, and those that did were signor feature phones.
Social media didn't really exist yet, at least not as we understand it today.
Many people had internet speeds that would be unusable today, so most information still came through the TV.
It's one of my few memories from that far back, actually. The television news, I remember seeing the attacks. Mom was folding laundry, I recall. I wonder sometimes if it's a "fictitious memory", but I think it's real.
Interesting how inverted things are, not even my parents watch TV much anymore, now the normal is getting notifications from whatever social media app.
But that's not quite right though. I think I get the sentiment, but it's not that people in 2001 weren't using socials as much as TV for news because of popularity. It was because they didn't exist yet. That's like saying that in 2001 the ratio of smart phone users to dumb phone/land line users were inverted compared to today, but yet smart phones weren't a thing then so it's not a good inversion comparison.
I have a memory of attending a preschool in somebody's house in 1986, and one day the teacher's son ran into the room saying that the space shuttle Challenger had exploded. The memory is so vivid, but I have no idea if it is accurate at all.
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/annual-recorded-music-sales-b...
(For context, this was the rural US southeast, and our family did have disk players, we just kept using tapes for a while. I remember the library had a lot more children videos and audio books on tapes than disks.)
Our family was gifted a CD player in 94 or 95, and all my music that I purchased with my allowance from that point was on CD, even though the unit had 2 tape decks. Mom only bought CDs from that point as well. Then when I got my first car in 01, I installed a radio that was CD only, no tape deck.
I was slightly older and have unambiguous memories of Mt. Saint Helens erupting, the Iran Contra hearings, etc. My fourth grade class submitted our teacher's name as a candidate for the Challenger mission, and I was in middle school when that mission disaster occurred. I was in high school when the Berlin Wall came down, and also high school for the first Gulf War, which was my first taste of endless, wall-to-wall TV coverage. I was waking up for work on the west coast when the 9/11 news came. The post-9/11 coverage was a weird echo of the Challenger disaster coverage (endless replay of explosion and crowd response) and the Gulf War coverage. And, I was just the right age to form a very cynical and jaded attitude towards all this, seeing it as a formulaic media orgy.
Similar to the Fark thread, the breaking news was also followed on other news aggregator and discussion sites like Slashdot. I don't really think the chatter and flood of links to articles or reference to real-time TV broadcasts was that much different than what people do with Twitter and other social media today. Aside from obviously having simpler text and images and less online video content, the difference was only in the percentage of the world population using the tools.
In response, it is kinda odd that this historical event started for me from an AM broadcast and then a wood grained tube tv in a school cafeteria. All of which changed in how feel about them. Even today, hearing AM radio puts me on high alert because the last time I didn't pay attention to it a big event happened.
I remember CNN.com being down for the longest time. I didn't have a television or radio so I ended up following along on the BBC website, which didn't crash. Kudos to the engineers behind that one.
I'd guess there's quite a few of them here. Most current college age kids hadn't been born yet. College seniors were newborns. Those under age 30 probably remember it, but they were most likely too young to really understand what was going on at the time.
https://www.theguardian.com/help/insideguardian/2011/feb/28/... (closure notice)
I don't remember if I got my first phone before or after this - I think maybe after, but I am honestly very unsure. I can tell you it was a 2nd hand 3310. Not everyone in school had one, because not everyone could afford it. Some people's parents didn't have them; most people's grandparents didn't. Landlines reigned supreme, and MSN whenever that arrived (still had a few friends without internet then, I was on dialup, a few people got broadband the year after).
I don't remember anyone using WAP really ever^. I don't really remember when mobile internet actually took off seriously but I remember a friend posting to facebook and getting updates via SMS in 2008/2009. Cool that you did use WAP, but you were likely a minority and that's nothing compared to the ubiquity of LTE connections of today.
^One of my friend's Dads worked for Vodafone at the time. Their HQ was commutable from where we lived. I discussed C++ with him a lot. I still don't remember anyone using WAP and they had staff discount, so your 12p/10p SMS was 2p for them. I only knew what WAP was because I read about it in PC Pro.
I think we had gone from almost no one having phones to the majority of the year having them in the space of that year. A lot of hand me downs from parents, and a fair bit of being envious of kids with Nokias.
The more recent equivalent would be following Twitter hashtags during terrorist attacks (until they became unusable with people actively spreading disinformation).