Web swoons as Jackson dies The death of Michael Jackson yesterday brought US websites low as fans old and instant sought to confirm they were indeed experiencing their own JFK moment. Gossip site TMZ is credited with being the first to report that the 50 year old Jackson had been found unconscious at his LA home and had been taken to hospital after …
A prophetic and probably true article unfortunatelly. Its the way it goes when a celebrity dies. I also predict Neverland will become like Graceland, the top 40 will be full of MJ music this week, and all the media that painted him as a sicko, will suddenly love him and make him a saint.
Personally, loved his music, liked the guy, saddened. :(
Hello boys - just to let you know I shall be especially strict today (yeah, yeah) so don't bother submitting anything horrible. Lightly offensive is fine, as ever, but try and stick to the point, and if you've got a conspiracy theory or some nasty crap you simply must get off your chest then tell it to Twitter cos it's not getting past me.
Thangyew.
I think they need to find an artist big enough to take on the masses that will flock to London - I think Chas and Dave! Might set them up for opening the London Olympics as well - now that is something I would pay good money to see.
Paris - because there is no 'wheres the Jacko angle?'
...apparantly, cos suddenly there were a huge number of searches/hour all for the same subject:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8120324.stm
I expected that to be El Reg's first dead Jacko story.
Will the public's grief now move on enough that I can bring out my "I shot Lady Di" Tshirts?
He really wasn't well - he had been looking very pale for a long time.
I heard that he didn't have a heart attack at all - he had a stroke in the kids bedroom...
Due to his unforseen death, his forthcoming dates have been cancelled. They were Kevin (aged 6) and Billy-Jo (aged 9).
What a coincidence Micheal Jackson and Farrah Fawcett passing away on the same day - one played with majors, the other with minors.
Mike's cremation has been cancelled - they wanted an urn full of ashes but someone pointed out to them that they'd have a puddle of plastic.
I'm already getting my coat.
>with its Top Ten bestselling CDs now exclusively made up of Jackson albums.
Call me a cynic but I reckon this is Amazon pushing the CDs more than actual fact.
As for spam, don't forget the 419ers wanting help to get his money out of Saudi Arabia, UAE or wherever it was he spent a fair bit of time.
It's exactly what really annoys me about the press and media in general. Jacko has been out of favour with them for some time, with people looking for any excuse to give him another knock. Now they'll be worshipping every bit of ground he ever walked on, forgetting about all the allegations of kiddy fiddling and whatever else he supposedly got up to.
I don't like him, never liked him, and that won't change because he died. People are entitled to their opinion whatever it is, but the hypocritical nature of the media just pisses me off.
What with the news being unmitigated Jackson, wall to wall coverage, endless talking heads and children who never experienced Jackson's music at the time it was released all emoting into their twitter accounts, I wonder what awful news the Government is going to be sneaking out today....?
You are not kidding, I bet there is some snopping law being passed that if you listen to MJ music you are going to be monitored for your private activities...
Either that or they are publishing the REAL figures of the MP's expenses!
£1m on a Michael Jackson look a like costume for one MP I hear...
RIP MJ
I remember when his music was the hottest thing on the chart and he was one of the early stars of MTV. I had just started college when the weirdness began with Bubbles the chimp and the rumors about sleeping in an oxygen chamber.
Was anything about him real? Did he ever tell the truth about anything or what just fit the moment? Did he ever have a single real friend out of his army of yes men and financial backers? Eventually I was only surprised at how he just seemed to keep topping himself in being bizarre. To be honest when I first hear the news I thought it was yet another publicity stunt.
But it still won't be over, the circus will go on. We'll have the books by anyone remotely connected to him, TV specials, and the inevitable movie. Rumors and conspiracies will continue as long as people remember his name.
So, does this mean that Web 2.0 has failed to prove much of an improvement over Kurt Loder interrupting lame music videos and trying to pretend like someone worth paying attention to? In that respect, the parallels between MTV News and Web 2.0sphere are kind of interesting. Still, it's nice to know that we can all rely on the internet as a real-time information source right up until everyone wants to do that at once.
I had a look to see if there were still many Michael Jackson tickets being resold on Ebay this morning, and a couple of of the auctions had bids for £10,000,000. No one is going to pay that was my first thought, then a colleague at work (who uses ebay) pointed out that if the auction ended with a bid that high, the buyer probably wouldn't pay, but the seller would get a Final Value bill for about £500,000 which would automatically come out of their Paypal account at the next billing point, and could take them 6-8 weeks to get it refunded.
"while the web demonstrated that it is not always the best medium for finding out the news that really matters"
I was watching in real time last night online and on TV as the news broke. It was very evident the TV people were using the Internet news as their main source of initial information. The first mention he died came from TMZ who were them quoted by TV people about the unconfirmed death, and then as soon as the LA Times web site joined TMZ in publishing he had (maybe) died (as yet unconfirmed), then suddenly all TV companies all jumped at the same time onto the bandwagon very evidently desperate not to be left behind in breaking the news. It was like watching a media shark feeding frenzy. They might just as well been shouting, "hey look at us" ... "hey look at us". They were all trying to out do each others news. They wanted to be first to say something new. It was blatant and yet all of them had nothing new to say before any official word was given, yet were desperately filling time asking the most insane questions to anyone they could get on the phone or in front of a camera.
Watching the news coverage was really kind of surreal. At times the TV interviewers were lacking more than a bit of empathy, but anyway, the Internet was definitely fueling the initial information. It was amazing watching it spread in real time. I think everyone was surprised he died so suddenly and I'm sorry he is gone. The world now feels a bit more boring, without one of its top freaks on the showbiz circus freak show circuit.
I don't however believe in holding people like him up as some kind of role model as some parts of the media are doing (thankfully The Reg isn't ... I love the comment about "fans old and instant"). He wasn't a role model he was very clearly psychologically seriously messed up and if it wasn't for his money and fame and the power that gave him, he wouldn't have been able to avoid so completely; people seeking to get him professional psychologically help. He is no role model. Endless attention seeking like him is a disorder not a virtue. So however someone like him perfects their ability to gain the attention of others, (in his case music and dance) its still driven by a disorder and still caused by a childhood lack of parental attention as with all people like him, who are usually classified as having Histrionic personality disorder (HPD). In his case, a very extreme example. So its no wonder other people with HPD will look up to someone who can gain so much world attention as a major role model. But that is no reason to emulate them. Plus as they are HPD they give very overly emotional performances on camera as they talk about him. Yes its sad he is gone, and especially so for his family, but come on, some of the fans are so way over the top. Its like they are going for some kind of Oscar performance for best grieving fan. His music was good (back 20 years ago), but I find it some what sick he is being held up by some parts of the media as some kind of top role model. Maybe they seek attention as he did and so also see him as their role model. It makes complete sense, the pattern fits and it also explains why some seek working in celebrate news media as they also want to be part of that crazy surreal insecure world.
The irony is so often HPD people try to prevent others seeing the real reasons why they behave the way they do (and give any other explanations as cover) and thats stopping everyone else seeing how to help them have a happier life, resulting in them ending up having very unhappy lives no matter how much money and fame they get and that is also Michael Jackson legacy as much as his music, his money and his fame. Yes his music was good, but he was very mixed up and he suffered for it.
There's already a joke site, up since at least lunchtime, using the death to try and dump some nasty script on people's machines (www.deadmichaeljacksonjokes . c o m - no, don't look!). Quick of the mark, these cybercrim types. (Does this qualify as the most literal use of the 'Joke Alert' icon?)
On other matters, have any dubious government announcements slipped out today, under cover of the hysteria?
First off, I have no doubt that "HPD" is a real psychiatric "condition". However, I would like to point out that one person's "serious illness" is another person's way of making a living - ever notice that "ADHD" didn't become "prevelent" until we had TV shows (with adverts) that cut from one thing to another quickly and computers that allowed you to do several things "at once"? If any common office worker could only do one thing at a time with email, IM, paper-shuffling, phones, etc. they would not be working very long...
But, hysteria was common in the 1700's... It affected mostly women, and could onset on a fairly weekly or bi-weekly basis. The common cure at the time was to let the woman (or man) have an orgasm, and eventually gave way to electric assistance in the 1800's.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_hysteria
The Paris Angle, because that's one angle I would continously volunteer to help "cure".
What gets me about this whole thing is not the fact people have 'forgotten' what he has been accused of, not the fact he was more plastic then human (*snickers* White Zombie song parody in the works here, you heard it here first people) but the fact that there are morons out there who are likening his death along the lines of JFK or Challenger:
"I will always remember I was in Times Square when he died"
"I will always remember the last time I let him molest me"*
"Meh hes dead who cares?"*
*Yeah ok I know only one of those is true but still.
I am curious about one thing though. . .what do the people who accused (rightly so??) him of kiddie fiddling think about all this?
*Best officer Barbrady voice* Move along people, there's nothing to see here!
I am aware that this is a miss-spelling above but if you seach with the above strings, it
does reveal that 'xpantyvirus' is up and about again,
luckily I was able to cancel this installation by clicking on the red x when my partner did a search and thus save having to remove this annoying spyware
Role model, god on earth, otherwise worth the gushing hagiographies? Probably not. I'll also posit that many of the over- the- top post facto assessments are probably being used by reporters (are there any real journalists anymore?) to try to justify the 24/7 coverage since bosses might look askance at spending airtime on "Talented performer dies unexpectedly just before major concert engagement", but "World grieves sudden and untimely taking of beloved icon" should get a green light and carte blanche to hang out at shopping malls interrogating kids.
Specific to Michael, I can't imagine that anyone raised in the spotlight since at least 5 years old would grow up WITHOUT issues; once he had enough money to build his own Hermitage, can anyone blame him for doing so? Shame he didn't spend some of that money working through his demons instead of shutting himself off from them in a lavishly appointed echo chamber, but that's hindsight for you.
In other news, as asked earlier, what are the Gubmint no- good- niks doing now that the media spotlight is shining elsewhere?
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