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Bad News 2.0

Posted by Dan (Sub-Editor) from Cardiff - Published on 26/06/2009 at 12:01
0 comments » - Tagged as Culture, Health, Music, People, Sport & Leisure, Technology, Topical

  • deadjacko

Yn Gymraeg // Welsh version

By the time you read this, you'll already know that Michael Jackson - the eccentric and undeniably talented King of Pop - has died of cardiac arrest (heart attack).  You probably knew it before today's early editions were printed.

That is why, despite my editor's request to pin an article on this breaking story asap, I chose text messages and Twitter to communicate the news; writing, editing and publishing an article takes more than 30 seconds and, as a result, is rapidly becoming a redundant form of journalism when it comes to breaking news.

They say nothing travels faster than bad news.  Word of Jacko's death came as a great shock and, as it seems is human nature, upon hearing the sad news we expressed our grief by dividing it up into bitesize portions and texting it to everyone in our phonebooks.  

In no time at all the news had travelled around the world, and within minutes of the first report there were already conspiracy theories, rumours of other celebrity deaths, and the inevitable sick jokes.  

If you lived alone with double-glazing and drawn curtains, had turned your computer off for the night, didn't own a television or radio and the battery on your phone had died, then it's possible you're one of the dwindling minority who awoke the next morning and became baffled by the words: "autopsy inconclusive: doctors divided on whether to blame it on sunshine, moonlight, good times or boogie" on several Facebook statuses.  

They weren't professing 'RIP MJ' because by then it was old news; everyone knew about it so there was no need to continue shouting it across the intarwebs.  By morning the jokes were no longer in poor taste, because the idea of a living Jacko was now a thing of the distant past.  He was a long-dead legend, up there with Elvis.

This is the rate the news spreads today, especially bad news.  Every second matters.  Someone might have died? Well that's not good enough: the combined forces of the internet demand more information, and we're not prepared to wait.  Last week seems like an eternity ago.  

Twitter crashed and had to remove their 'trending topics' because the words "Michael", "Jackson" and "Died" toppled their mighty servers in minutes.  That is the power of bad news.  And sure, Jacko's death moved us: he's going to do amazingly in the charts for the next week or two ? absolutely no doubt about it ? but that's the fleeting nostalgia our generation seems to experience when we don't have time to process grief.  

Last week something happened in Iran, this week Jacko died, and in a month both memories will have given way to the new burst of micro-news to shoot past our eyes before we have time to process it.

Scientists at the University of Southern California have warned of the dangers of such rapid processing of bad news.  "Rapid-fire TV news bulletins or getting updates via social-networking tools such as Twitter could numb our sense of morality and make us indifferent to human suffering," their report suggests.  "New findings show that the streams of information provided by social networking sites are too fast for the brain's 'moral compass' to process and could harm young people's emotional development.  

"Before the brain can fully digest the anguish and suffering of a story, it is being bombarded by the next news bulletin or the latest Twitter update."  There is certainly no denying that bad news travels fast in the information age: the night of Michael Jackson's death Twitter's update frequency doubled and Facebook's tripled.  

"We saw an instant doubling of tweets per second the moment the story broke," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told the LA Times.  "This particular news about the passing of such a global icon is the biggest jump in tweets per second since the U.S. presidential election."  People also reported slowness on news websites, instant-messaging services and blog sites.

As social networking, instant messaging and an almost bloodthirsty public impatience for bad news continue to grow rapidly, are we perhaps entering an age not just of information, but of filtered emotion?

LINKS

CNN: Scientists warn of Twitter dangers

Guardian Technology Blog: Diagrams and videos of social networking usage during time of MJ's death

Mail Online: How Michael Jackson's death shut down Twitter, brought chaos to Google... and 'killed off' Jeff Goldblum

Telegraph: Michael Jackson set to be number one in charts following his death

PICTURE: Raul Orozco

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