The Celebrity Death Phenomenon

Patrick Swayze is the latest. Michael Jackson was the biggest. There was also Billie Mays, Bea Arthur, Dom Deluise, Farrah Fawcett, Ed MaHon, John Hughes, Les Paul, Ted Kennedy, and countless other lesser known celebrities have died this year. Celebrities die all the time though, why does this year feel different?

People are starting to make a big deal about how these celebrities are dropping dead left and right. I have a few ideas about why this phenomenon seems like a huge deal. It’s essentially a convergence of several otherwise incidental concepts.

First off, possibly the biggest deal, the heavy penetration of Social Media. In the past, some celebrity dies, maybe the morning radio show is talking about it, maybe you spot an article in a tabloid newspaper while waiting to check out, basically, news just didn’t travel as fast.

Now we’ve got news that travels literally at the speed of light. I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging, because I’m not and I don’t care, but I was probably one of the first hundred or so people to tweet “Michael Jackson is dead”. Why? Because the television station I work for shows TMZ. TMZ broke the story on their website and immediately sent out an email telling us we needed to get a reefed of the show with “breaking news”. I get these sorts of emails all the time. The point though is that almost instantly, (in fact before it was confirmed because TMZ was being ambitious), this news had gone across some news desk, out into email, out to my Twitter and the spreading across my web of followers. This same stem of information was spewing from hundreds of other sources as well.

Within maybe, 15 minutes, essentially everyone would know that Michael Jackson had died. The news spreads through Twitter and Facebook and personal IMs and IRC and across the news. You don’t have to wait until you hear about it on the news or the Morning zoo, then wait till you drive to work to discuss it with your coworkers. It’s all nearly instantaneous.

But the social web isn’t the only factor. Look at that list of names. When were these people stars (for the most part)? The 1980s and 1990s. The 1980s saw a massive increase in the use of Cable Television. It also saw the advent of the VHS VCR, allowing us to watch these people over and over. It saw the advent of pop culture pushers like MTV (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTV), E!, People Magazine (actually the 70s), and in general, it was the rise of the concept of “celebrity”.

Previously we had the concept of “The Star”. These would be people like The Beatles or Frank Sinatra, or John Wayne. They were popular icons of entertainment but for the most part our exposure to them was limited. Suddenly we had television out the wazoo and magazines telling us every detail of the glamorous life of Hollywood.

Move ahead 10-20 years and throw in the internet. Now you can find entire websites dedicated to telling us every tiny detail of the lives of people like Paris Hilton or Angelina Jolie. Every act, no matter how insignificant is documented by at least a dozen obsessive fans.

Also, keeping with the time frame of popularity in the 80s, Many of these people were already 30-40 years old during their heydays in the 1970s and 1980s. That was nearly 30 years ago, these celebrities are now in their 60s and 70s. Traditionally, people in these sorts of positions don’t tend to lead the most cautious lives when it comes to keeping up their health. Many of these celebrities are simply reaching the point when they are ready to kick the bucket. His coupled with the increase in the number of celebrities hanging out in the public eye for longer periods of time makes it seem like there are a lot of people dying all at once.

The end result is that this increase in popular celebrity deaths isn’t something that is going to go away any time soon. I predict that it’s only going to get “worse” as the year rolls on and increase even more so in the years to come.