I can't stop watching the news.

I come in from work and quiz my girlfriend. Any news? What's the latest? I flick on the TV and pass seamlessly from 6 o'clock news to Channel 4 news without moving from my chair. I snatch a meal, radio on in the kitchen.

"Unprecendented…good versus evil…the world changed for ever…World War III…We'll get those folks"

Every news program starts with a recap. Again and again and again, the World Trade Towers are struck, from every possible angle, freeze frame, in slow motion, like some horrible stunt. I see fat plumes of smokes rolling in all directions. People running, crying, dust-caked, blood-streaked and bewildered.

And then that horrible, impossible clip of someone in a suit tumbling down from the 100th floor, bouncing off the glass, flailing. You don't want to watch that but how could you not? They're showing it three times an hour. You can't turn it off.

Confirmed. Unconfirmed. The newcasters, the reporters - I know them all - they're like me. Desperate for any new information, roving through newsfeeds, clinging to casualty estimates. 5,000. 10,000. 20,000 dead.

Friends come round. "Where were you when it happened? Did you see the first plane? Can you fucking believe it? Did you know anyone? What about that missing plane? Did they shoot one down over Pennsylvania? I'm never going to fly again."

After seven days of saturation, I now know everything about American foreign policy, Afghanistani geography, and flight trajectories. I've got a layers of minimised browser windows on my taskbar queuing to be looked at, scan-read and forwarded. I'm sure I've created 100,000 page impressions on BBC online today alone.

I bought all the papers, the "Terror In America" supplements. "More on pages 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10". I watched "Attack On America", "The Day The World Changed", and "America's New War".

Why am I not getting bored of this? Why can I watch the same clips over and over again?

Simple. It's because it's such an amazing disaster, a complete rewrite of all the existing definitions of 'disaster'. Not just one plane crashing. But two. Three. Not an accident or pilot error - but deliberate. Not crashing into the sea but into a packed Manhatten skyscraper. Not just a flaming inferno but a imploding megaton inferno.

It's the rubberneck instinct that keeps you watching, captivating, compelling. You have to know what's going on. Constantly unfolding, constantly changing.

And what is my emotional state as I watch all this? I don't know. This is what TV does to you. It suspends you. It grips you. It freezes your mind. Only when you turn it off can you start to digest what you think.

Except you just can't turn it off.

by Sophie Moore

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