Where were you on Sept. 11?

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It's a question that will occupy dinner parties for the "Internet generation," much as JFK's assassination helped define the TV generation in the 1960s.

But a more relevant test of the zeitgeist for those transfixed by Sept. 11 and the hours that followed might be "what did you do when the planes hit the U.S.?"

It seems we all did much the same thing, as unwitting witnesses to a symbiotic marriage of old and new media and communication. The Internet didn't come of age during this crisis. It revealed its enduring true function.

I was in an instant messaging three-way with my mother in Melbourne and by videophone with my brother in Osaka. On a separate screen, I was messaging with a close friend, who's an editor in London. My mother, brother and I were chatting about nothing in particular when she wrote -- because she had the TV on in the background -- that "a plane has crashed into the World Trade Center," reminding me that my wife and I used to live just two blocks away from the WTC in Battery Park. My London friend reported the same.

Instinctively we all shut down MSN and went to the TV to watch history being terrifyingly made.

As far as the Net was concerned, we may as well have been in the Taliban's Afghanistan, where it's banned. The Net suddenly was of little relevance and even less interest.

Like many in Asia, I didn't get much sleep that night, or for the next two days. My cable-enabled computer didn't get much of a workout either. The first attack on the WTC occured at 20:48 Singapore time. I first went to the Net at about midnight and powered up a browser. The BBC is my home page but it took forever to load. Same with CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post and all of the U.S networks.  CNN's ratings rose tenfold in the U.S -- no different, I'm sure, from results at other sites -- while hits on news websites doubled. I'd bet most Netheads were disappointed when they logged on.

With telephones in New York City down, I whipped off a few e-mails to friends there and, thank God, got replies within 10 minutes. I didn't need to have long conversations with these friends -- those and the hugs will come later -- but I needed to know they were safe. I then became their conduit for other mutual friends elsewhere in the world.

I then abandoned the Internet as a bad joke for two days and stay glued to the box.

Right there, the Internet's deficiencies -- and its efficiencies -- were revealed in the most eloquent statement a user can make. As a content provider, with the clunkiness of the medium and its big files cramming mostly dialed-up telephone lines, the Net was lacking. But as a communicative tool, it was cheap and effective.

Only days later, as the shocking but compelling TV images became commonplace and the spot news fizzled out, did I return to the Net. People now had time to think and contemplate. And here the Internet again proved its usefulness, but only after traditional media had performed its primary function.

I now knew what to expect from CNN and the BBC but I was intrigued by what I might find on the sites of Pakistan's Dawn, or the Tehran Times, or the skeptical American magazine Mother Jones or from the Arabist intellectuals who frequent the columns of London's Guardian. And, as a Singapore resident hostage to its parochial, controlled press, I wasn't going to uncover much that's not mainstream in the local media. But there was a downside -- the flood of wacky chain mails and .jpeg files, some funny (if you weren't American), most distasteful and bizarre. Going forward, I now I have a new "favorites" folder with such sites as Iranian Today, Afghan Web, Janes, military.com and the excellent Arts and Letters Daily. Somewhat ominously, I called the folder "Afghan War." I expect it to be there for some time.