"Major world events and major technological developments trigger revolutionary changes in the communication practices and problems of people everywhere. Such events also catalyze research about the ways people communicate, in order to understand events and improve our approach to solving problems, informing, comforting, and helping people go about their business. In history, the printing press, the telephone, television, and computer technology have all stimulated new applications and new understandings about human communication. The holocaust, Viet Nam, and the Gulf War have each spawned volumes of social scientific learning about the relationships of the media to the public. The terrorist attacks on the U.S. and its responses—the real-time broadcast of events on every television, the cell-phone calls from the World Trade Towers and from airplanes, the email messages of reassurance of surviving family members, the web pages listing missing persons, and even the live videophone images of bombs in Afghanistan—contain unprecedented developments in the use and impact of both mass and interpersonal communication technologies. . . ."