Michael Jackson and grief in our age
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After Michael Jackson died last Thursday, there was an outpouring of grief. I live in Los Angeles and at various places, from Jackson’s home to UCLA Medical Center, people gathered and laid out mementos of mourning. It made me think of grief in our instant information age. Public grief has evolved through the ages, from Lincoln’s body being transported on a train as people came out to pay their respects, to the death of JFK and the subsequent grieving through extensive television coverage–the networks covered Kennedy’s assassination and funeral for 70 straight uninterrupted hours. I am not comparing Michael Jackson with Lincoln or Kennedy but the death of the King of Pop made me wonder about our cultural attention span around death. It seems shorter to me. Our world is so speeded up that it feels like periods of grief have been speeded up, too. I remember when Kurt Cobain and Princess Dianne passed away, and there was a longish period of reflection of their lives, but mourning periods seem faster in today’s world. In the last week several pop culture icons–Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, and Jackson–have died, and I wonder if our love of real-time information has changed the way we recognize death. I think it has.
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I’m wondering if it’s our sense of intimacy that really has been changed by living in the info era, not death. We often know more about the lives of these people then we do about our own family members.
I don’t know more about any public figure than I do about my family. I think as a community though, we are more concerned with the big, bold, people, and less with the our neighbors, the lady at the coffee, and the guy who mows the lawn at the gym. We still want that shared experience of mourning, so we mourn the people none of us “know”. Also, the cycle is so fast, it is hard to stay on topic. We are moving on to the next story before the eulogy is done. Hang on, just got a tweet, gotta go!