More Deaths Or More Twitter?: Colleen McAllister
David Carradine. Michael Jackson. Billy Mays. Dom DeLuise. Ed McMann. Steve McNair. Walter Cronkite. John Hughes. Ted Kennedy. DJ AM. Patrick Swayze.
There’s been a lot of celebrity deaths this summer.
Natasha Richardson and Farrah Fawcett were literally the only celebrities who died this year whose deaths I did not find out first over Twitter. (I followed the Richardson story on actual websites and I was watching the news at work when I heard about Farrah.) But their deaths were all over Twitter and Richardson’s was before the “Trending Topics” feature was a universal Twitter trademark.
I’m not going to even get into how the majority of us find out news firsthand through Twitter, because we’ve already touched base on that. (For the record, I find out breaking news over Twitter all the time then I go to more ‘reliable’ or ‘old fashioned’ news sources to find out the details.)
My boyfriend and I were talking about something after we heard about the death of DJ AM over Twitter. He asked me, “Is it me or are there a lot more deaths this summer? Or it possible that we were just more aware of them because of Twitter?” I told him I thought it was probably a combination of both.
Last night, I saw the following Tweet:
@jhummrich: Patrick Swayze was too young…. Is it the availability of twitter that makes it seem like more and more people are dying? Instant news….
Joe echoed what Jay & I had wondered a few weeks ago. So what do you think? Is this the Summer 2009 of Celebrity Deaths or are we just more aware of it because of the handy dandy “Trending Topic” feature?
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I would say it is the fact that news is more widely available, I don’t think that there is some plague killing off famous people I just think that we are more aware of it now, also and you didn’t mention this but these days we have more celebrities alive thanks to the internet, even Colleen could be considered a minor internet celebrity. Now if someone like Stephen Colbert died then we might have a major problem
I was having this EXACT discussion the other day.
I think its a combination of the two. I think we’re all so tapped into social networks and twitter that we’re hearing MORE about things. I was online last night when the Patrick Swayze news hit. within about 5minutes, my entire tweetstream was hit with “RIP Patrick Swayze”, even before it hit trending.
I think what it is with twitter is that we’re SEEING the messages more often. If a celeb dies normally, they’re on the news that day, and then they vanish, and you may only see the news once. With twitter, you’re seeing the same message 100000times that day, and so it’s becoming alot more engrained on you than seeing one news show on the subject might.
HOWEVER: I do also think there has been a huge amount of celebrity deaths in the last 2-3months as well.
So yeah, a bit of both.
I think that this summer we have lost a lot of celebrity icons, I don’t hear about the deaths via twitter and I still think it has been a bit overwhelming this summer. One of the common themes seem to be cancer and sudden cause unknown deaths. We talk more about the unknown reasons or the unusual circumstances. If David Carridine had died a natural death, would it have been publicized as much?
re: twitter: to be honest most of the people I follow have connections to Lost. I tend to use facebook. I don’t tweet.
RIP Jim Carroll
Wait…Michael Jackson died!?!
I think it’s a little of both.
I think more people are considered “celebrities” than used to be. Twenty years ago if DJ AM had passed only his fans would have known. Now with TMZ and others there are more celebrities than there are fans.
I do have to admit - the way I found out Patrick Swayze died was via twitter, and honestly, most times I’ve found out someone died via a text, or email or website. I honestly have to say though, more known celebrities seemed to have died this year than not known ones. Example - every year I read the bit in the paper about who died over the year, usually I have heard of maybe a handful, but this year, there have been a lot of them. might just be me.
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