The Death of the King of Pop as Digital Phenomena
Thanks to Wikipedia’s tech-blog we can see how Michael Jackson’s death looks from the perspective of server load and traffic:
Wikipedia Load Spike - MJ RIP
Traffic Spike
This kind of epiphenomenon is the bread-and-butter of research that tries to interpolate social causes from digital reverberations. Not that any such research is going on, but once we’ve all grown sick of mining vulgar Latin textbooks for word preference, we’ll develop procedures to handle stuff like this.
Updated to note that the second-order epiphenomenon related to this is the crash of Wikipedia’s tech blog due, I assume, to the massive amount of traffic I’ve sent it. In 30 years, I imagine some poor PhD student will be trying to track the traffic-related crash of tech blogs to the death of pop icons.