Last night I stayed up late watching the breaking news about the capture of the suspect in the Boston Marathon Bombings. Along with the live coverage of the manhunt in Watertown, the news teams showed how cellphone photos and surveillance footage was used to identify the men suspected of this horrible deed. Imagine what it would be like if that same technology had been around when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.
In the unlikely event that John Wilkes Booth had gotten past modern type secret service agents, and taken his deadly shot, everyone in the theater would have taken out their smart phones, video taped his escape and had them uploaded to U-Tube before he even left the building. How far would Booth had gotten, if everyone was aware of what had transpired within minutes?
My point is that technology is not only effecting our everyday lives, it is changing the way is history is made and how it is recorded. The Montana Post, published in Virginia City, Montana Territory, carried the news of Lincoln's assassination on the front page of the April 29, 1865 edition. It is hard to imagine that people in Montana Territory did not even know that President Lincoln had been assassinated until two weeks later. Can you imagine what it would be like to have access to the live coverage of the pursuit of Booth and a press conference in front of the boarding house where Lincoln was taken after being shot.
While I sometimes think that we are slaves to our devices, spending more time than we should tweeting and checking our email, it is times like these, when history is being made, that I am glad that I am alive during a time where we can be witnesses to the events that effect our lives and lives of future generations.
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