We are all part of one great oneness–and the Internet.
Twitter was crashing, the Los Angeles Times website was overwhelmed, AOL’s online Instant Messenger went down completely, while Wikipedia was lighting up like a Christmas tree.
In so many ways men and women are different. But as we saw this week with the death of music superstar Michael Jackson, when it comes to a huge breaking news story, Martians and Venusians are pretty much alike. We humans want to be connected, and the Internet provides us with that sense of connectivity wherever we are during the day.
Perhaps Thursday’s unexpected news combined with the thousands of Twitter messages (tweets) bubbling up from the cauldron that has become daily life in Iran, at last removes any doubt that we have entered the age of the global village.
The Jackson story makes a powerful point for that position. The news coming out of Los Angeles started to build Internet traffic starting at approximately 2:45 Pacific on Thursday afternoon, shortly before 6 PM in New York, 11 PM in London, and in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Sydney, morning commuters were already on their way to work or just arriving at their destinations when their mobile devices began to beep, buzz, and ring.
By 3:15 p.m. Pacific, Google News users began experiencing difficulty attempting to get a response to search queries related to Michael Jackson, At its peak an hour later, Google Trends rated the Jackson search requests as “volcanic.” Meanwhile, ground zero for Hollywood buzz, TMZ.com, which broke the Jackson story, crashed several times throughout the afternoon and evening hours. When it did, millions of users switched to celebrity gossip maven Perez Hilton’s blog, which quickly struggled to deal with an unanticipated explosion in hits and suffered a meltdown of its own.
Of course the Internet’s newest darling, Twitter.com, was not going to escape this tsunami of requests. Its system crashed as users saw multiple “fail whales” — the illustrations the site uses to post error messages.
Finally, Wikipedia witnessed its own avalanche of activity, with close to 500 edits made to Jackson’s entry on the site in less than 24 hours. Although Wikipedia at times was also overwhelmed, within seconds of the Associated Press issuing a news flash that Jackson had died, his Wikipedia bio page changed and reflected in the quick facts column Jackson’s date and place of death, “Los Angeles, California, June 25, 2009.” No need to wait for an updated almanac or encyclopedia, in the digital age, for the famous at least, your tombstone is just a quick click away.
For over two hours the Los Angeles Times struggled to handle the traffic coming into latimes.com with multiple failures; but the biggest crash of the day occurred at AOL where the company release a statement confirming that its Instant Message service, AIM, was ”down for approximately 40 minutes” in what a spokesman said was a “seminal moment in Internet history.” The AOL spokesman went on to say, “We’ve never seen anything like it in terms of scope or depth.”
It will be a week or more before the full picture of Internet traffic spikes and crashes is fully documented and explained, but it is safe to say with a vastly expanded network of iPhones, Blackberrys, and a host of other mobile devices, Thursday’s online traffic has touched a new high.
When examined by gender, how we share information with others can vary greatly. Undoubtedly Venusians retained the Jackson story longer than Martians, who by that evening or on the following day had moved on to other stories, but it appears clear that whenever there is a huge and totally unexpected news story men and women alike want to be in the loop.
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