If the Titanic Sunk Today

If Titanic sank in the age of social media, assuming an internet connection, we’d have:

Livetweets of the events, including locations of separated group members and info posts on where to go for open seats on the lifeboats (there were many).

Authorities and nearby ships would have been alerted promptly to the emergency. The SS Californian was within visible range of Titanic less than half an hour before Titanic hit the iceberg, and the only reason a rescue operation was not attempted was that the wireless operator went to bed. Hundreds and hundreds of people could have been spared from hypothermia and drowning.

Video and photo documentation of the rampant human rights violations. White Star Lines denied locking the gates to steerage, so the distaseful poors couldn’t get to the boats before the first class passengers and their pets and then the panicking assholes forgot or chose not to unlock some of them.

In the era of smartphones there would be pictures, video, desperate cries for help documenting all of this. there would be a social media firestorm. The heat from the PR staff might reach the captain, and those gates might have been unlocked before the life boats were all launched. We would have a global debate about class issues, instead of decades of “that didn’t happen” until cameras found the gates still locked on the ocean floor.

We’d know where she sank from Minute 1, and recovery of the bodies and sentimental property, not to mention study of the structural damage for the purposes of determining the cause of the failure of the watertight compartments, could begin immediately and aid in future design/protocol changes

Hell, what if the ship’s lookouts had twitter, and someone on the Californian posted their iceberg alert? the Titanic wireless operator was busy sending a giant stack of that era’s social media messages from passengers (”hi mom and dad im on titanic lol” in morse code) but maybe the people who needed to know what was going on in the water wouldn’t have been deprived of the info they needed.

Fucking hell, just the pictures and videos and goodbye messages from the people who didn’t escape would have been an unbelievable gift to the world.

Everytime someone posts about how cell phones and pictures and selfies are ruining humanity because we didn’t have them in the past, like… it usually proves the opposite.

There are tons of historians who would shit gold bricks if they could get ACTUAL FOOTAGE of what ACTUAL PEOPLE experienced during their lives at any point in the pre-camera past

And somehow, there this man, Leo Hyland, sat in a lifeboat and watched as the ship went down. He did this sketch because he wanted to capture that moment in an image so people would understand what happened. So that they can see what he saw in that moment.

It is a most fundamental form of human goodness to wish to share our experiences and our feelings with others and to connect with them. It is no less noble to document your life through a smartphone than it is through a sketchpad.

If you’re on a boat that fucking sinks and you survive? Show me your pictures to show you were there and you survived to tell your story. Fuck these preening, pseudo-intellectual ballbags that say otherwise, because they quite clearly don’t have a fucking clue what they’re talking about other than trying to express the stance that they think they’re better than other people because they don’t have a facebook and have literally fuck all to say or show about their lives other than an inflated sense of self-importance and worth.