I didn’t quite know what to expect when I first embarked on this blogging thing. It was a bit like putting a message in a bottle, or maybe on Voyager I; I just started to transmit random thoughts into a void and wondered whether anyone might read them.

What I didn’t expect at the time, although now it seems so obvious, is that blogging isn’t simply about firing off random screeds about Murakami or the Olympic opening ceremony or Charlotte Rampling or university administrators with amusing names; it’s about people responding to said screeds and then other people responding to the responses and the whole rhizomatic structure of words and thoughts and memes and GIFs of piglets in wellingtons that results. It’s The Conversation, a term frequently used by Fiona, aka Patroclus, one of the first people to acknowledge the existence of Cultural Snow; and a witty, erudite writer on her own blog and as an observer of the whole phenomenon. We only ever met once in meatspace, in a dark bar off Tottenham Court Road, but that seems oddly appropriate for this virtual age. I called her the Poly Styrene of Web 2.0 and I stick by that. (I never met Poly Styrene at all.)

Patroclus has rather withdrawn from the blogosphere (did we really used to call it that?) in recent years, devoting her efforts more to her business and her family and things Cornish but she does pop up occasionally on various media. And I was touched and amused by a tweet she sent this morning:

Unfortunately she couldn’t remember what exactly it was she was reading, which is a pity, because I could have sold it to big pharma. But it does give me a chance to direct you to pages 155-156 of my book The Noughties where I contend that the end of Lehman provided a symbolic closure to a truncated decade that had only truly begun seven years and four days before, a few blocks away. (Which is maybe why the book is so short.)

As the events of 9/11 remorselessly drift back into the realms of anecdote (here’s mine if you missed it before) and soundbite cliché, we come to realise that Baudrillard was right to an extent; for the majority of us who aren’t directly affected, big events don’t actually exist. All we truly experience are the reflections and distortions that the media offers – which is why I’m posting this today, because it’s really about what got said and written and posted yesterday, rather than about what happened a dozen years back. And sometimes these reflections barely even pretend to be about the destruction and misery perpetrated on that bright blue morning. Look at The New Yorker’s slideshow of its own 9/11 covers and ask what’s really being commemorated. And I’m not even going to talk about this:

But, hey, there are still a few happy surprises to be had in the most unlikely places. Amidst this year’s bout of navel-gazing was David Wong’s witty but thought-provoking analysis of the years since, including this reminder to us old farts, especially if we find ourselves working in an office full of 20-somethings:

And this rather wonderful picture by Toby Amies, who was there or thereabouts:

Because, let’s face it, most of us weren’t victims or heroes on that day. Most of us were bystanders, viewers, consumers. And still are and will always be.

There’s been a bit of digital thinking aloud with regard to The Guardian’s abortive @911tenyearsago experiment (although not in The Guardian, oddly enough). Ian Hepburn at False Doorway explained his unease: “We lack neither the immediacy of the events happening now, nor the distance of – say – the World War 2 tweets in a similar vein put out by the National Archive.”

Distance is key it seems, both chronologically and geographically. But as Hepburn suggests, it’s not simply a case that the further away you are (whether in three- or four-dimensional terms) the more you can get away with. I’ve previously discussed the pervasive view of Hitler in Asia, that he was a historical figure who was probably a nasty piece of work, but not really the absolute archetype of evil that he might be in the west. And as such, the idea of dressing up as a Nazi doesn’t seem quite as terrible to Japanese or Indian people as it might to the British (let alone the Germans). Yes,  of course people still do it, but those in the public eye rarely avoid a public flaying, as that amiable halfwit Prince Harry discovered to his cost a few years back.

The odd thing is that as the events of the Second World War grow more distant, the public reaction against this sort of behaviour gets not more indulgent, but less. And then a friend (who happens to be half-British and half-Japanese, which may or may not be significant) reminded me that in 1986 it seemed rather amusing that a cricketing hero should doll up as a Colditz commandant. I doubt his heirs in the current squad would be let off so lightly. Although the Indians might find it moderately amusing.

Odd. A Twitter account appears, apparently under the auspices of The Guardian. It is called @911tenyearsago. It describes the events of September 11, 2001, in real time, beginning with “Mohamed Atta and Abdulaziz al-Omari board American Airlines Flight 11 at Boston Logan airport” at 0735 EST. Reaction can best be characterised as surprise, rather than shock; but it picks up nearly 4,000 followers in a couple of hours, so there seems to be a level of interest. Flight 11 hits the North Tower at 0846; President Bush, preparing to enter the Florida classroom, is informed of this nine minutes later. And then... “This account of the events is now ending”. Time freezes at 0905, the South Tower unscathed, Flight 93 still chugging to San Francisco, oblivious to its fate, its role in history and folklore, its forthcoming movie career.

So what went wrong? Were there complaints? Did someone’s bad-taste radar go bleep? And if so, why? Why should an accurate, purely descriptive report of the events of 10 years ago upset people so? No hymns; no prayers; no flags at half-mast; no Paul Simon or James Taylor (baby-boomer sensibilities are more tender than those of mere mortals); no released doves. (Were there doves? There must have been doves at some point.) Feelings are permitted; the facts, suddenly, are verboten. Emotional fascism, Elvis Costello called it. Odd.

PS: The Onion gets it right, but doesn’t it always? And Sam Burnett puts things in their proper context.

A couple of years back, I wrote a book. Maybe you noticed me mention it. Did you read it, or at least buy it and mean to read it? Some people did, which was nice. It’s still available by the way; as far as I know, no copies were looted. Anyway, it was a book about the Noughties, and as such, there was rather a lot in it about the events of September 11, 2001. Indeed, it’s probably fair to say that I cast 9/11 as the main character in the drama of the decade, the point around which everything else revolved. Which is hardly a radical piece of historical revisionism, but almost as soon as the book had gone off to press, I began to have my doubts. A few years before, I’d written a piece for The Guardian about the way that, post-9/11, the slightest disturbance in New York City seemed to trigger alarms in editorial offices in all corners of the world, even if it turned out to be caused by a common-or-garden accident; so a plane crash in NYC that kills two people is the headline in Le Monde, edging out a train crash in France that had killed 12. But in writing the book, I’d put my scepticism to one side, and worked within the mainstream, Applecentric perspective.

But it still niggled: was this agenda really viable? Was 9/11 really the lynchpin of the decade, for everyone from Beijing to Bamako? Were the 230,000 people wiped out by the 2004 tsunami really a smaller blip on the decade’s radar than the 3,000 who died in the terrorist attacks? In some of the articles I wrote to tie in with the book, I did try to raise the possibility that the overwhelming significance of 9/11 was a question of geopolitical perspective, but I really didn’t have the courage of my convictions. (I hope, however, that I’ve earned a little kudos for linking the phrase “false dawn” to the election of Obama.) Anyway, multiple brownie points to David Rothkopf, whose Foreign Policy article identifies 10 – T*E*N! – things about the past decade that were bigger than 9/11.

Also: the late David Foster Wallace, in 2007, tells the truth by asking questions; Rupert Cornwell on a wasted decade; Blackwatertown offers the journalist’s angle; Mrs Peel checks out the visuals; and Christopher sums up everything so neatly and sweetly that I don’t know why the rest of us bother.

But I will anyway. Since everyone’s been pitching in with their where-were-you-when story over the past few weeks (we’re all Zapruders now), I’ll bore you with mine one last time. I was in the British Museum, which had a small display dedicated to the work of the architect Norman Foster. I was particularly interested in the Millennium Tower, a projected development in Tokyo which, had it been constructed, would have been the tallest building ever. To give some idea of scale, they put the model alongside simulacra of about a dozen other buildings that had been, at the time of their construction, the tallest in the world, going back to the Eiffel Tower. So, when I got the call telling me that the first plane had hit (I seem to remember the news of the second strike coming while I was looking for a pub with a telly) I was standing over a model of a building that never was, and a couple that very soon wouldn’t be.

(The image above is an Indian pharmaceutical ad from around 2003, courtesy of Gothamist. And below is a place where the towers still stand.)