Peter Griffin: Mobile meltdown

I was playing a decidedly vicious video game called God of War when I heard news of the bombings in London.

The news came via text message from my mother, a former child of Belfast, who has in her time felt the warm blast of a near miss, courtesy of the IRA. She was letting me know that my big sister, a Londoner for seven years, had finally got through to say she was fine after hours of trying to dial out on overloaded London phone lines.

I quickly dispatched text messages and emails to friends in London. Replies came back, but not as quickly as I'd have liked. The mobile network was, after all, in meltdown and many people were left stranded away from their computers.

I had that feeling that would have gnawed at thousands of people: an irrational but nagging fear that technology would evaporate with the beep of an incoming text message. That's the thing about technology in all its electronic pervasiveness - we've grown accustomed to getting things now, not later today, in tomorrow's paper or in next week's post. Now.

But as the aftermath of the London bombings showed, when we need it most, all the gadgetry in the world can't put our minds at rest.

However, as the technology we're most accustomed to using buckled as everyone reached for the phone in London, it was also playing a role in recording the unfolding chaos of the horrific tragedy.

London saw the first widespread use of mobile phone cameras and digital still cameras as tools of pocket journalism. Citizens climbing, soot-covered, out of wrecked tube carriages or evacuating city streets, paused to record the carnage. They sent pictures and video clips to news organisations to give us a taste of what they experienced.

Those grainy, subterranean video clips hit home much more than any eyewitness accounts can. The technology is so pervasive that the London police were asking for video footage in the hope that a pixelated shot taken on a mobile-phone camera would help them to uncover who was behind the attacks.

It was the most striking use of technology in news reporting since the invasion of Baghdad, when embedded CNN cameramen rode the highway into the city with US Forces, their cameras sending out live feeds via satellite phone. The images stuttered their way on to our screens, showing often nothing more than dusty highway, but we were riding into battle as an audience. It was the most direct news reporting I'd seen since September 11.

It's a sad irony that the most significant use of technology is often sparked by the most significant of tragedies.