The extensive media coverage of Michael Jackson's death and memorial has kept journalists and camera crews occupied for days on end. Facebook-CNN.com reported over 700 thousand status updates and CNN.com totaled over 100 million page views and 10.5 million live streams on Tuesday alone. I have been very interested in the whole process because it marks a turning point in how we follow breaking news events. The merging of boundaries between news and social networking sites as access points makes these events participatory in a way they have never been before. It was not that so many people watched Michael Jackson's memorial; it was that so many people participated in his memorial.
However, the most compelling part was the questions on people's mind, both here and outside the US:
* Why do we care about somebody we don't know?
* Why is it such a big deal?
* Why doesn't anybody talk about how creepy Jackson was in the later years? (Honest, that was a real question.)
* Why do we grieve for celebrities?
Yesterday, a Twitterer posted that it was hard to get ready for a family garage sale (in the East, it's a 'tag' sale) because you are trying to place price tags on sentimental value. It occurred to me that Jackson's death is like a garage sale--it feels like you are letting go of parts of your life. In grieving Michael Jackson' death, we are saying goodbye to some of our own memories, hopes, and dreams.
There is no disputing that Jackson was a cultural icon. His contributions to music and dance define specific periods on the timeline of US pop culture. His unique history is a manifestation of the American Dream and has the stuff of heroic myths, a journey against odds and hardship to achieve triumph that would make Joseph Campbell proud.
As a public figure, Jackson's sudden death forces us to deal with the passage of time and mortality--his and ours. As someone else's death always does, or at least should, it reminds us that we, too, are mortal. We will not ever be that age or that person again. For Baby Boomers, this may be particularly profound because, as a generation that has defied society's rule on numerous occasions, we are in total denial about aging and death. We really do not like it when one of our own serves as a reminder
While there is a large body of psychological literature examining the phenomenon of parasocial relationships--when people feel like they have personal relationships with celebrities they don't actually know--I believe the enormity of the response to Michael Jackson is more about us. We have lost something with larger social meaning.
The cultural prominence of Jackson's contributions as a musical genius whose talents crossed many social and artistic bridges means that he provided a backdrop against which our lives played out. It is very hard to separate that presence from the experiences we have both personally and in society at large. Jackson inspired many an artist. But for each artist he inspired to dance or sing, he provided social context for a hundred times that many people, almost transparently. This is what we saw from the outpouring around his Memorial. We saw all the people with memories connected to his artistry. My daughter was born the year Thriller was released. My sisters lip-synced to Ben. And what about Michael Jackson songs for ring tones? How many kids dressed for Halloween like 'The Gloved One'? (How do we even know what that means?) How many Boomers made their kids watch the ENTIRE Thriller video? Or danced to Billie Jean? How many times have you sat through your kid's school chorus performance and listened to Heal the World? There will be as many memories as there are people. That's a lot of memories to lose in one day.
Because it is really about us, why would we want to talk about the negative stuff? We are still in this world and we and the world are a richer place for Jackson having been here--even if you didn't like him or his music.
Michael Jackson was, however, an outlier. Geniuses are outliers by definition and I believe you don't get the upside for free. But biologically, we, as human beings, respond to outliers, oddities, and discontinuities with fear and suspicion. Out in the Savannah, hanging out when things didn't feel right was not good for your health. You didn't associate with things that were threatening in any way because generally that meant you were somebody's dinner. Jackson could have been perceived as by some as a threat because of the questions about his relationships with children, his changing appearance, perceptions of what he meant for race, masculinity, and even fashion. But out there on the Savannah, once something dies, the threat is gone. We don't have to focus on the negatives; we can luxuriate in the positives. We can look and say "Wow, that was a REALLY BIG tiger!" without having to worry about being eaten.
Loss of any emotional attachment causes a grieving process. Humans don't like change much anyway and we certainly do not like uncertainty. We grieve for Michael Jackson and ourselves because the world won't be the same. With the passing of icons, we lose pieces of our own stories. We build the image of these icons by projecting our meaning onto their public personas and then decorate that by hanging pieces of our lives on songs, events, and images. These projections are real for us and we are emotionally committed to them. We feel real loss. Death doesn't erase what we built, however, and the act of grieving, especially in such a shared public space afforded by social media, allow us to reinforce and strengthen the things that were important to us. As we progress through the grieving process, we will remember things much less critically. We will integrate and internalize the hope, inspiration, and attributes that we loved or that inspired us. We will ultimately look at Jackson's life and say with awe and appreciation "wow, that was a REALLY BIG tiger!"
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photos: Thriller album; istock photos
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