Δύο μέρες μετά το θάνατο του "Βασιλιά της Ποπ" και όλος αυτός ο πρωτόγνωρος καταιγισμός ενημέρωσης και αναζήτησης πληροφοριών για το γεγονός, με οδήγησε σε μια μικρή έρευνα πάνω σε δύο ζητήματα:
1. Αντέχουν τα νέα μέσα ένα τέτοιο "ηφαιστειώδες" (όπως είπε το Google Trends ) γεγονός;
2. Μαζί με τον τραγουδιστή θα θάψουμε και τα παραδοσιακά μέσα;
Επειδή όλη η αρθρογραφία που προέκυψε είναι στα αγγλικά σας παραθέτω τις απαντήσεις στα δύο ερωτήματα στην Αγγλική:
1. Αντέχουν τα νέα μέσα ένα τέτοιο "ηφαιστειώδες" γεγονός;
"How many people does it take to break the Internet? On June 25, we found out it's just one -- if that one is Michael Jackson." (CNN report)
The biggest showbiz story of the year saw the troubled star take a good slice of the Internet with him, as the ripples caused by the news of his death swept around the globe.
On Thursday, the TMZ site, better known for embarrassing photos and "dish" than hard reportage, beat everyone. The 911 call from Jackson's home went out around noon Los Angeles time; TMZ reported the cardiac arrest within an hour.
"We've just learned Michael Jackson was taken by ambulance to a hospital in Los Angeles... and we're told it was cardiac arrest and that paramedics administered CPR in the ambulance... and it's looking bad," it said.
It followed up shortly afterwards with: "We've just learned Michael Jackson has died. He was 50."
The massive level of interest caused the site to go down temporarily but that did not stop the news spreading via blogs and social networking sites. TechCrunch reported that TMZ, which broke the story, had several outages; users then switched to Perez Hilton's blog, which also struggled to deal with the requests it received.
Twitter saw a large spike in users with up to 5,000 Jackson-related messages being posted per minute, which slowed the service's speed.
Soon after news of his death emerged Jackson-related topics dominated Twitter's list of most popular subjects being discussed on the site. Twitter slowed to a crawl, as Jackson-related posts climbed to more than 100,000 an hour.
Biz Stone, co-founder of the messaging site, said: "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.”
Facebook saw a similar response, with the number of postings tripling during the hour after news of Jackson's death broke, according to a spokesman.
people searching for news on the singing phenomenon, with a number of contributors posting conflicting reports of his condition for a short time.
Google, the search engine, also encountered problems for a time due to the demand. So many people wanted to verify early reports of his death that computers running Google's news section interpreted the "Michael Jackson" requests as an automated attack for about half an hour.
Soon his death was dominating the top 10 list of Google Trends, which monitors web searches, with up to seven of the slots dedicated to Jackson subjects at one time.
At its peak, Google Trends rated the Jackson story as "volcanic."
Google turned away Jackson queries with this message: "We're sorry . . . but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. . . . We can't process your request right now."
The Instant Messaging feature at AOL crashed for 40 minutes, as thousands sought to tell the news directly to thousands of others. That was backed up by AOL consumer adviser Regina Lewis, who said that, although the numbers weren't in yet, the day should prove a historic milestone for mobile Internet traffic. "It could go down as the biggest mobile event in history," Lewis said.
"One, people clamor for the latest news; two, they share it; three, they react; and then the next stage, which we're seeing alive and well on video sites ... are tributes. In the case of Michael Jackson and Farah Fawcett, [people have] a lot to work with in terms of images and video," she said.
By Friday morning, news sites seemed to be coping with traffic, but Jackson fan site mjfanclub.net was still performing sluggishly. Mashable.com reported that tributes to, and remarks upon, Michael Jackson's death were responsible for 30 percent of tweets.
2. Μαζί με τον τραγουδιστή θα θάψουμε και τα παραδοσιακά μέσα;
When the next set of BBC management expenses is published, it would be no surprise to find senior news executives charging for a subscription to tnz.com. Because, on Thursday night, the American entertainment gossip site was ahead of the world's major news organisations with the news of Michael Jackson's death.
Though creditable – and allowing the online provider a quick chorus of "beat it!", aimed at the famous networks – this victory brings some shivers. The news newcomers work by rules on reporting and sourcing that are different from those of traditional television journalism. On this occasion, the web whisper proved to be the entertainment news scoop of the decade; many other times, such buzz turns out to be as reliable as sightings of the Loch Ness Monster.
Yet, even so, the coverage of the singer's death was the greatest demonstration to date of the way in which new media have revolutionised TV news. No outlet now dared to wait for the old insurance of at least two reliable reports. CNN, Fox, Sky News and BBC2's Newsnight all cut into their running orders with the first tnz.com flash.
In the past couple of weeks, social-media sites have been instrumental in keeping people in the loop about Iran's unrest and Michael Jackson's death, highlighting a transformation in the news-delivery industry. The shift, years in the making, has given social networks and their close cousins like YouTube a bigger role in how people learn about and react to world events while leaving newspapers and television struggling to adjust.
Millions of people no longer rely on a morning paper, or its online equivalent, to get news. Rather, many are tipped off by friends or complete strangers through Twitter and Facebook, in posts that appear alongside family snapshots, random complaints and movie recommendations.
"The first place people go are these social-networking tools rather than the conventional media," said Shannon Vallor, a philosophy professor at Santa Clara University who studies social networking. "More people are using the major media outlets as places to go after they've heard the basic story to get more information."
Social-media sites played a somewhat different role in Iran, where political unrest erupted earlier this month. Unlike Jackson's death, the sites were used to disseminate eyewitness accounts instead of to repeat what had been reported elsewhere.
To get around a crackdown on professional journalists in Iran, supporters of the Iranian opposition candidate used Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to raise global awareness about their protests and the violence that the government used to stop them. A camera phone video showing an Iranian woman bleeding to death in the street ultimately made world headlines.
Jeff Jarvis, director of the interactive journalism program at City University of New York and author of the media blog BuzzMachine, said the growing popularity of social-media sites is recasting the job of traditional journalists. He sees them as curating, vetting and giving context to news that bubbles up from teams of reliable amateurs they've already recruited.
To get extra exposure, some news organizations are already making links to their articles available through Facebook and Twitter, so users can share them. There's no guarantee that people will visit their Web sites directly, he said.
News organizations, Jarvis emphasized, "can't wait for everyone to come to them."
However, the risk is that people on social-media sites read the news headlines without clicking through to the publication's Web site, eliminating an important source of revenue. Jarvis said that it was always a myth that newspaper readers read every article in print and that, in the digital era, they have to take particular care to write headlines that entice people to click on the links.
Social media is shaping up to be the latest challenge for traditional media, which is still grappling with how to reinvent itself in an increasingly digital world.
Although social-media sites have been credited with breaking news on occasion, they are also prone to spreading false rumors. For example, Twitter posts on Thursday inaccurately reported the death of actor Jeff Goldblum. It's a distinction that traditional media has used to bolster its case for relevance.
Ken Doctor, a news industry analyst with Outsell Inc., a research and advisory firm with offices in Burlingame and London, sided with the social-media sites in saying that people want speed first. Erroneous information is usually corrected by fellow users on such services, making news more of an evolving process.
"People want to know first, even when things may be wrong," Doctor said. "But the crowd will then correct it quickly."
This is the way things are now: live broadcasting can wait for nothing – not even death. In the 50 years that Michael Jackson lived, the rules of journalism have gone from wait-and-see to show-and-wait.
Αυτά τα ολίγα! Οι αναλύσεις όμως είναι σαν την εκδίκηση...είναι καλύτερες όταν είναι κρύες. Stay tuned!
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