Death and the Internet

There's been so much news about people dying that it's been a real downer.

First, legendary Chicago journalist John Callaway died this week. He was 72. I saw him in February when he sat on the panel at the Chicago Journalism Townhall, which was aimed at trying to save the field of journalism from dying.

Then Farrah Fawcett lost her fight to cancer yesterday. She was 62. I remember watching Charlie's Angels and like a lot of my girlfriends, I tried to recreate Farrah's look. With my ultra thick hair, that was a disaster.

Then on the same day that Farrah passed away, Michael Jackson died at age 50. WTF? I remember in college his Thriller cassette was all that me and my friends listened to. OK, that's a little bit of an exaggeration because we also listened to Madonna, Lionel Richie and Whitney Houston. But I wore out that Thriller cassette tape, for real.

Even my first memory of music involves Michael Jackson and goes back to when I was around 6 years old. My uncle, who was a teenager at the time, had a bunch of his high school friends over, and they were listening to "ABC" by the Jackson 5. I still have a soft spot in my heart for that song.

By now, you're thinking, "What the heck does this have to do with social media?" Um, everything! Let me explain. Last week, I felt like I was getting a little bored with the Internet. Like I was checking the same websites for my news every day. Logging on to Facebook and Twitter and none of my friends seemed to be saying anything that really interested me. No offense y'all! I'm sure it was just the mood I was in.

But heck once I heard about the news about Callaway, I kept checking Twitter and other sites to find out what happened and to read what people were saying about it. Same with Farrah. And even more so with Michael Jackson because it was just so unbelievable that he would die so young when he was about to kick off a tour.

I noticed a couple of interesting stories about how the pop icon's death nearly knocked out the Internet. CNN had a story today with the headline "Jackson died, almost takes Internet with him." I'm sorry but that headline cracked me up! The lead was kind of funny, too. "How many people does it take to break the Internet? On June 25, we found out it's just one--if that one is Michael Jackson."

Computerworld also had a story about it titled, "Michael Jackson's death sparks Internet crush." The article says, "The unexpected death of pop icon Michael Jackson last night sent people rushing to the Internet for news updates and to share their feelings." It went on to say that traffic on sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google all spiked in the hours after he died. "Akamai Technologies, which tracks online traffic, noted that traffic to the hundreds of news sites it tracks, including CNN, Reuters and the BBC, jumped to more than 4.2 million visitors per minute. That was up from 3 million visitors per minute in the hours before Jackson died," the article said.

I ain't gonna lie. I was one of those people--checking news sites both before and after he died. I'm a news junkie. What can I say? When I first learned that he collapsed, stopped breathing, had a heart attack and/or was in a coma, I checked every website I could think of to find out what was going on. At first, I thought my computer was super slow. Then I realized it was the websites I was checking (Facebook, Twitter, Chicago Tribune, the L.A. Times, CNN, among others) that were slow.

Still I know TMZ was the first site to report his death, but I didn't really believe it because I don't think of it as a credible source of news. I think the L.A. Times was the first newspaper to report that Michael had passed away. Then I knew it really was true.

We have come to rely on the Internet when big news is breaking to get information instantly. I don't think any of us could live without that at this point. RIP John, Farrah and Michael!