‘All character is action’ goes the old Hollywood cliché — that is, we learn far more about people by how they behave than we do from what they tell us about themselves. Whatever else you think about the internet (for good or ill), it does two really important but significantly different things to allow us to pursue this study of homo sapiens: first, it allows us to connect with each other in ways and with a frequency unimaginable just a few years ago (and so amplifies our natural tendencies); and second, perhaps more significantly, it allows the curious to watch and listen to how vast numbers of folk respond to events in the outside world and marvel at how they interact with each other as a result. It helps us see the character of the human beast in action.
This week has offered us a prime example of this. For those of you who have been asleep, marooned on a desert island, locked in the Big Brother house or for some other reason isolated from all news media and/or human contact, at 19.21 GMT last Thursday one of Michael Jackson’s staff called the emergency services to his LA residence and the star was pronounced dead of a cardiac arrest a short time later. While the death the same day of another 1970s pin-up, Farrah Fawcett, seems to have generated a moderate amount of affectionate and respectful response around the world — polite obituaries in newspapers and on news sites and tender messages of respect — Jackson’s sudden and dramatic demise has unleashed a tide of really interesting human behaviour.
First, there has been a rush to share the news with other people: long before the mainstream media got hold of the story, ‘Michael Jackson RIP’ was being passed from person to person, via blogs and instant messaging, Facebook and Twitter. Indeed, Wikipedia turned out to be the best news service of all — one of the first mentions of the story was on Wikipedia’s Michael Jackson page. Wherever an individual picked up the story — i.e. from traditional or new media — he or she seemed to want to pass it on to others. Indeed, for the first couple of days, the story — like all hot news items — seemed to become de rigueur in small talk, like a new but temporary feature of modern manners.
Second, the response has been huge and emotional. Many feel a personal loss at the demise of the moonwalking Jackson (but almost certainly had never met the man) — not you or I maybe, but many millions. And on a scale that is hard to believe: for example, for 25 minutes on the 25th, Google was overwhelmed; such was the scale and the frequency of people typing in ‘Michael Jackson’ to the search engine that the folks in Mountain View assumed they were under cyber-attack. During this period, screens displayed only a ‘We’re sorry’ page. Both the social media and good ol’ text and email have hummed with personal (and often incoherent) statements of grief, and continue to do so, days later. From heartfelt messages of lament to fan videos, from ‘homage’ performances by celebrities to special commemorative cakes (yes, really http://www.cakewrecks.com), this seems to be an event that affects all kinds of people to a disproportionate degree. Now, as after the death of Princess Diana, normal and apparently sensible individuals seem to find themselves caught up in something bigger than themselves. And it has to be said, they seem to be enjoying it.
Equally, there has been a sudden explosion of sick jokes and gags, spinning from person to person, round and round the web. Most are probably unprintable and many definitely defamatory. A number of scurrilous websites and blogs have sprung up to take advantage of this outbreak of hunger for mortuary humour (including the self-explanatory ‘Deadmichaeljacksonjokes.com). My personal favourite suggests that the Jackson family’s second autopsy revealed that neither the sunshine, moonlight nor the good times were responsible. Instead, doctors wanted to ‘blame it on the boogie’. I also smiled at the joker who impersonated the Foreign Secretary and managed to fool a host of professional news journalists working for the likes of the Times, the Guardian and Sky with this odd twitter message: ‘Never has one soared so high and yet dived so low. RIP Michael’.
In lots of other ways, Jackson has become a topic for conversation again after years of invisibility — all the old stories about his father’s influence, about his alleged sexual orientation, about his fragile mental health and hopeless grasp of financial management have all been given a new lease of life. Nannies, staff, friends, victims of alleged abuse have all stepped forward to help us enjoy them together again. And again.
And finally, as every music executive will tell you, premature death is great box-office: from being a struggling former superstar whose record sales had dropped off dramatically in recent years, Jackson is now outselling all-comers — this week seven out of iTunes’ top 10 albums are MJ’s. The self-styled King of Pop is back in our hearts, albeit in circumstances that he himself would probably rather have avoided.
So what does all of this behaviour have to tell us about the human character — about who we really are? It shows that we are highly social creatures and not the individualists that our Anglo-Saxon traditions would have us believe: people’s first action on receiving news like this is to pass it on to those around us by whatever means they can. We check its veracity (or plausibility) by sharing it with other people; sometimes we just repeat it. Indeed, the more it is repeated, the more plausible it seems.
Second, it shows that we are highly social creatures — much of the emotional outpouring (the all too public grieving that can seem sickly sweet to many of us) seems to be less a response to the news itself and more a response to our peers. As with the Princess Diana experience, the emotions appear to be contagious — they spread far and wide as individuals follow other people’s responses to the ‘terrible news’.
Of course, we can do this because, as the neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni puts it, much of our mental apparatus is highly tuned to the other people who populate the world we inhabit: in the game show of life on earth, ‘other people’ is our specialist subject. This is also what lies behind the renewed popularity of Jackson’s music. It’s popular because it seems that other people find it popular (as Yahoo’s Duncan Watts has previously demonstrated is the case for most popular music).
Finally, it just shows that we are — that’s right — a supremely social species. Very quickly, we find new and admittedly often tasteless ways to use the thing — in this case, Jackson’s demise — to interact with other people; to turn the news, to use the current jargon, into a ‘social object’. Alas, poor Michael. It turns out that even though we didn’t know him at all, he’s provided us with another great set of excuses to do what we humans do best — interact with others. Lord knows what the public funeral will bring.