Digital Mourning

The death of a superstar is a barometer of our society. Michael Jackson’s death, announced overnight in the UK, is a global news story. But it has also been the first of the Twitter era. We read about the deaths of Elvis Presley and John Lennon in the newspapers. We expressed our grief about Diana on television. Twitter is now the medium through which a worldwide legion of pop fans express their feelings in public.

A staggering 22.61% of Tweets contained the phrase “Michael Jackson” at its peak in the two hours after his death. In total, at least 30% of Tweets in the last 12 hours are remarking upon the star’s tragic passing, according to the Twitter tracking tool Twist, and that’s just those that use the star’s name.

Blogs were carrying the news first alongside entertainment websites. Around 11pm UK time, dozens of Wikipedia users started updating the Michael Jackson page with the still unconfirmed news, and Wikipedia editors were unable to delete the new entries as fast as they were being updated.

Within an hour of the first reports that Jackson was dead, Wikipedia appeared to be overloaded and the site reported “technical difficulties” preventing the relevant pages from being accessed. In that time, Wikipedia editors had finally intervened and two articles about Jackson were locked for about six hours, preventing them from being modified until the situation became clearer.

Of course there are dangers in the intense and rapid proliferation of news stories via social media. Rumours abound on the internet this morning about the deaths of Jeff Goldblum and Harrison Ford. Both are untrue, but both are being spread by people so desperate to tweet something big that it’s not worth stopping to question the rumour.