Michael Jackson and the speed of information

On the afternoon of Thursday, June 25, Michael Jackson’s fame peaked with the sharp spike of fascination that comes moments after the death of a celebrity.

First reporting the story was TMZ.com, the Jerry Springer of entertainment Web sites. While Fox News, CNN and MSNBC were starting to post news of the singer’s collapse, TMZ had already declared Jackson dead. (For the first 40 minutes, CNN listed the singer as suffering “serious cardiac arrest.” Well, yeah. It’s always serious when your heart stops beating.)

The Iran election was knocked from the top of Twitter’s trending topics for the first time in two weeks as millions of users tweeted the news, causing the site to go down repeatedly. Perez Hilton, the self-proclaimed “Queen of Media,” posted his usual snark alongside a picture of Jackson, with the caption “Heart attack or cold feet?” referring to the singer’s recent postponement of 50 sold-out shows he was set to perform in London. “We knew something like this would happen!!... We are dubious!!” Hilton wrote, going on to encourage ticket holders to get their money back and accusing the singer of faking to get out of the shows. (Minutes later, when reports of the death started pouring in, Hilton edited his post to simply read that Jackson was suffering a heart attack and his mother was on her way to the hospital.)

Before Jackson’s death was officially pronounced, several sites were created for people to share their memories of the pop icon. Fans scrambled to be the first to record their reactions to his passing and get them up on CNN.com. There was a live feed of spectators gathering outside the Los Angeles hospital where Jackson had been taken.

Within hours, barely anything else was being discussed online. Twitter had to temporarily remove the trending topics and search capabilities to keep its site from crashing. Entertainment Tonight claimed to have the last known photograph of Jackson, a shot of the singer, his pale skin and sculpted nose unmistakable beneath an oxygen mask, being wheeled into the emergency room. News sites erroneously reported the deaths of Jeff Goldblum and Harrison Ford in an effort to be the first to scoop the story of Jackson’s death with… well, another death. The home address and financial and legal troubles of Jackson’s personal physician were posted for all to see. CNN.com was getting 20 million hits per hour. Jackson’s Wikipedia entry was edited 500 times. Tribute videos made their way onto YouTube. And people who dared to declare there were more important happenings in the world came under fire from Jackson’s loyal fans.

Bad news always travels fast, but Jackson’s death took that phenomenon to an extreme. The news traveled everywhere in an instant. TMZ.com broke the story, but didn’t distribute it—it distributed itself, rippling across social networking sites and instant message chats and cell phone handsets at the blinding speed of human interest, powered not by the guiding hand of a centralized mainstream news organization, but instead by the power and momentum of the information. We live in a great invisible web sphere of interconnected information, where anyone can communicate with anyone else, and if the news you have is of interest to the whole world, then it will be seized up and propagated throughout the entire system at a speed that we don’t even have a measurement for yet.

There was arguably no larger living cultural icon than Michael Jackson. His album “Thriller,” from 1982, with its (then) unique blending of pop and rock, catapulted him from adorable family-friendly child star to legendary singer. It remains the bestselling album of all time, with an astounding 47 million copies sold. MTV was still cutting its teeth when Jackson began making music videos that rivaled feature films in quality, cementing him in the popular consciousness as not only a musician, but an entertainer. His single-glove look and dancing style was emulated the world over.

Michael Jackson had a difficult time dealing with his fame, and his personal life has been fodder for tabloids and comedians for decades, with his strange collections, pet monkey and enormous play-land house. The world watched as his skin became lighter and his facial features and figure became thinner. He was accused of child molestation and embroiled in the scandal and subsequent trials for a dozen years.

Also, he had a llama.

It’s no surprise that his death would be of interest, the final stop in a long, messy train wreck.

But not many people handle fame well. Underneath all the interest in his personal life and death, it was Jackson’s music that embedded him into the popular imagination in the first place. Back before the wild tabloid stories and the age of the Internet, he became beloved by generations for his wonderful ability to entertain. While the global information event following Jackson’s death on June 25 is a testament to the power of lightning-speed information sharing, the fact that so many people took an interest can only be credited to him.