Mosque of Nasr Mohammad ibn Qalawun (Mamluk Period) Southern Enclosure of the Citadel
Cairo, Egypt
When I was in middle school, someone quoted a line in Pay it Forward, and said that if he could change the world, he'd get everyone in China to jump up and down– literally causing the world to shift on its axis.
The thought, since then, has disturbed me.
Some nights, as I fall asleep, I wonder, who could actually convince all the people of China to do such a thing, and what would the consequences be.
On a somewhat unrelated note, Michael Jackson's death had quite the effect on society – even causing the internet to slow down.
Here's what happened:
When TMZ, the celebrity/entertainment gossip website, broke the news, fans began immediately Twittering.
But that's not unusual as Twitter's citizen journalism accounts have been vital in today's rapid changing, constantly online environment (as in Moldova, the Iran Election Protests 2009, and the Tea Party Protests). I'm sure not very many people were suprised when a fail whale began to appear.
Google, on the other hand, bombarded with searches for "Michael Jackson" responded to requests with a response automated for viruses instead, telling users "your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application." Big whoops. AOL, CNN, also suffered drawbacks, so it's not as though Google was the only one hit, reported the BBC.
That's not all. This morning, after presumably half the wired (and wire-less) world was already informed of the news, newspapers in Pakistan still had to have raging headlines of the flamboyant musician's contributions to err, music? (Dawn, the leading English daily in Pakistan, had most of us at Newsline doubling over in laughter when we saw that their headline read "Jackson stuns fans again, with sudden death").
Really, though? Remember when Lady Di and Mother Teresa died on the same day, and Mother Teresa, blessed soul, didn't get the worthy media attention she deserved. This was like that, only, somehow worse.
Did the leading English daily of Pakistan have to blast a headline that most of Pakistan's elite, English newspaper reading population already knew? And thus subsequently downplay the headline "Afghanistan, Pakistan and Russia to act against drugs, terror" a headline, and article which I believe had much more importance and relevance for the Pakistani people.
Well done MJ. I guess you know that's when you've really lived life – when your death not only breaks news hours after it's already been broken, it manages to slow down the internet. As Dawn stated, "Jackson’s death brought a tragic end to a long, bizarre, sometimes farcical decline from his peak in the 1980s, when he was popular music’s premier all-around performer, a uniter of black and white music who shattered the race barrier on MTV, dominated the charts and dazzled even more on stage." (I couldn't have put it better myself).
That's all from me about the King of Pop. Minus the fact that Billie Jean has been playing like a broken record in my head, and hearing people react to his death still amuses me.
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