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Television's coverage of the tragic events of September 11 can be viewed and understood as a paradigmatic disaster marathon. The salience of the attack's visual images, their exclusivity on the screen for a protracted period, and the invisibility of their perpetrators enhanced the attack's effectiveness. The paper highlights a number of problems that the September 11 disaster marathon poses to the profession of journalism and to society, and points out possible remedies for the future. It ends with a short discussion of the ways in which television's coverage of the event both resembled and differed from the media-event model, and of theoretical aspects of its unique dimensions as a disaster marathon.Television, Media Events, Disasters, Disaster Marathon, Terrorism, September 11,

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This article explores the uncharted territory of reflexive internet humor about networked computers. A combined quantitative-qualitative analysis of 250 texts sampled from popular websites yielded a map of the main themes underpinning this massive corpus of humor. We analyzed them in relation to three grand theories of the nature of humor -superiority, release, and incongruity -locating each theme on a matrix deriving from the theories: (i) a superiority axis, running between the powerful and weak players in the networked environment; (ii) an incongruity axis, running from the purely human to the strictly technical, and (iii) a release axis reflecting degrees of tension generated by the former two dualities. Our analysis suggests that humor about networked computers extends to a comment on the nature of humanness in a bewildering age of artificial intelligence. The communication of this reflexive comment may be shaping a global community of computer users.