The death of Pop and the rise of hasty news

We received sad news about Michael Jackson passing away at Chilis Happy hour, right around 3PM. One of my co-workers was checking Facebook on his iPhone and saw some comments on Michael RIP. Although these were terrible news I couldn't help but to be absolutely amazed by the promptness in which we had received the news over frozen margaritas.

I was also commenting how I would love to see one of those cool Wired charts on the exponential growth of the speed of news spreading.

The chart could take the form of a timeline and show:
- Average time passed before learning about death of Marco Polo
- Average time passed before learning about death of Leonardo Da Vinci
- Average time passed before learning about death of John Adams
- Average time passed before learning about death of J.F Kennedy
- Average time passed before learning about death of Kurt Cobain
- Average time passed before learning about death of Lady Diana
- Average time passed before learning about death of Michael Jackson
... and so on, with indications of technological advancements: telegraph, radio, tv, web and finally the mobile web.

This again relates to the topic of our dependency on technology and how invasive it has become in our lives.

I was also surprised to read an article this morning about fake news of celebrity deaths—aka "death pranks"— which shows a real problem with the reliability of our new source. Quite concerning.





Please, another one of those cool charts to show the curve of news reliability go down as technology explodes and filters disappear.