On Sept. 11, 2001, one of us (Darrell) was teaching a political science course at Brown University, while the other (Nicol) was four days away from her wedding in Westchester County. The morning of those infamous terrorist attacks, Darrell had finished his lecture and while walking across campus encountered a fellow professor who said it was terrible what happened to those planes. “What planes?” Darrell asked, unaware of the attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C. This was the time before ubiquitous cell phones and social media platforms, where news traveled quickly inside classrooms and around the globe.

At the time, there were no smartphones to initiate a video call with loved ones. The active cell phone service was down after the Twin Towers were hit in New York City, which made it difficult to hear from family and friends who may have been in the vicinity of the plane crashes. Similar occurrences happened in the series of related terrorist events in Virginia and Pennsylvania. Neither of us also knew how dramatically technology and the world would change following the terrorist attacks. Substantial alterations in news transmission, technology innovation, telecommunications networks, disaster preparedness, personal privacy, digital inequity, and security levels arose after the tragic events of this day. From a virtual standpoint, so many things have shifted over the last two decades that it is hard to imagine the world as it existed in 2001.