"Crazy!!! Did you hear Michael Jackson died!"
I screamed out to my roommate, "Holy shit Michael Jackson's dead!"
Gasps and utterances about Billie Jean and needing to get a drink ensued, while we texted friends like chain mail and scrambled back to our computers to Google for more details. Oddly, only one source said Jacko was a dead man: TMZ. It'd be another 45 minutes before LA Times would confirm his death.
Although the celeb gossip site is no CNN or the New York Times, I knew I could trust it, much like I knew I could trust my friend. Why? They are both based out of LA; they are both linked to Twitter. (Side note: I used to work for a newswire service in LA that got most of their best tips from TMZ.)
No longer do the paparazzi have to bribe paramedic insiders and ER nurses. Now, thanks to Twitter, hospital staff can be news-bearing glory hogs themselves! At first I thought it was weird that tens of thousands of obsessive Twittering phone junkies and faceless cubicle heads can know when tragedy strikes strangers (I can think of three plane crashes earlier this year) before these strangers' loved ones do. But then in the case of MJ I realized: Do his parents, or his plastic siblings, or his nephews named Jermajesty, count as loved ones? I think it was more fitting that fans were the first to find out.
Newspapers are caving, magazines are shrinking. No one wants to print words anymore and no one wants to pay anyone to report and relay them either. (Trust me. I know.) So I joined the town crier of the 21st century last night. (Okay, I joined Twitter months ago but didn't do a damn thing with it. I thought of it as another distractionary extension of Facebook but for the worst type of narcissist and compulsive status updater. But then I realized most of those over-updating moms still haven't caught on to tweeting yet. And even if they do, I don't have to feel bad about not following them.) I even added a link to the left of the blog. (Warning: I'm still standing on the outside of the playground waiting to jump in.)
Oh well, there goes all that thesis momentum I was building.
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