Dina M. Oieimy

Creating Alternative History: the Online Poetic Responses to 9/11 Dina M. Oieimy

The online poetic responses produced for the events of September 11, 2001 present a new direction in the representation of these events which contradicts with that imposed by the American mainstream media. Therefore, this book draws an analogy between the offline official media representations of the events and the online responses that are created and posted by the public users. The first part, in this comparison, reveals how the American official media was following a certain agenda that aims at traumatizing Americans in order to get their support behind all the government decisions (e.g. Bush's decision of the US-led war on Afghanistan). On the other hand, the second part, shows how the online users find -in the web- the freedom and the space to present their own personal readings that can be considered as another historical narrative to the 9/11 events. Besides the examples that show the offline media's representations of the events, this book presents different samples of the poems that are posted online in a way to show how the mainstream media representation is criticized by the public.