Giving iPhone Its Moment in History

摘要

There are moments in history that place one-to-many communications media in pivotal roles. These events ("Where were you when you heard...?") become elemental markers in history not just because of the enormity of what happened, but also because of how they were conveyed to the world. You can't write the history of radio, for example, without mentioning Herb Morrison's eyewitness report of the Hindenburg disaster in Lakehurst, N.J., back in May 1937. It was a gripping national broadcast of the fiery crash of a German zep-pelin that took 36 lives. And don't forget Orson Welles' War of the Worlds program in October a year later. Its depiction of Martians marching on U.S. cities panicked listeners, who thought the invasion was real and flooded police stations with calls for instructions or to report the odor of poisonous gas.