Where Were You

Submission 30,356

Part of a series on September 11th, 2001 Attacks. [View Related Entries]

About

Where Were You, often expressed as the hashtag #WhereWereYou, is a question asked by Americans each anniversary of the September 11th, 2001 Attacks to share their memories of what they were doing at the exact moment they found out about the plane collisions.

Origin

On November 7th, 2001, country singer Alan Jackson released the song "Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning," a memorial song about the September 11th, 2001 attacks months before. The song won the Grammy Award for Best Country Song in 2002 and Song of the Year from many different country music song associations. As of April 2015, the song has sold 368,000 digital copies in the United States.^[1]

Spread

Every year on the anniversary of the attacks, the song experiences a peak in popularity. In 2015, the hashtag first appeared in this context overnight between September 9th and 10th, with people beginning to tweet about their experiences.^[2] The top tweet was from Speaker of the House John Boehner, who attached a video his office had prepared for the occasion:

His tweet received 56 favorites and 62 retweets. Other political figures, like former New York Governor George Pataki,^[3] also shared their stories, along with many people who claimed to be past and present residents of New York City and many who claimed that the event had changed their entire lives in some way.^[4] By 2 pm EST on September 11th, 2015, the hashtag had been used almost 10,000 times.^[5] The spread and use of the hashtag was covered in both NBC News and online magazine Heavy.^[6]^[7] In addition, there are at least 150 different "Where were you on 9/11" threads on Reddit, and the question is commonly asked on other forums as a "serious" type of inquiry.^[8]