The crescendo of grief and digital group hugs over the death of pop idol Michael Jackson took down some of the Internet's top search and social networks last night. Google struggled. Twitter crashed. Facebook spun out scripting errors. Wikipedia stammered. YouTube sputtered.
In short, Jackson's death was the biggest event in the short history of social media.
The mysterious and shocking (though not surprising) demise of the King of Pop seemed to dwarf even primetime sharing moments like election night and and uprising in Iran. Last week, media maven Clay Shirky said of the Iran reaction exploding on Twitter: "This is it. The big one." And he was right - for the Internet era that was last week. This one was bigger, and here's why.
First the obvious: dying iconic pop stars trump political street battles in countries halfway around the world, unleashing a massive community of grief that will never be matched by that some of us may feel for murdered street protesters. We may think that makes us something less than a responsible, attentive society. But it's not going to change.
So beyond the MJ icon thing, why did the news hit with megatonnage for social media? For one, the sudden spread of such cultural momentous news hit the network in the late afternoon and spread like wildfire. Huge events like the presidential election and the disputed Iran election unfolded; Jackson's death hit like a bomb.
For another, the rapid adoption of social networking among older users - ie, people who were Michael Jackson fans in his prime - made venues like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and news search sites like Google the media of first choice. I suspect that many people used their phones to tune in, or kept cable TV on in the background while jumping into the global conversation on the social networks.
So everybody had something to say - and they all wanted to say it at the same time. Then too, the very nature of sites like Facebook allow the easy sharing of media; Jackson videos were everywhere last night and the sheer volume of footage shared online had to set some kind of record.
But there's another reason as well - the personal nature of social media. I think my friend Peter Daou got at the core of it with his quick Tweet after the news broke yesterday: "With the loss of anyone famous what we're really mourning is the passage of our own lives, their death a marker on OUR journey."
