Spartan Echo

Section: Entertainment

NEW YORK (AP) - "Ladies and gentlemen, Michael Jackson has just died," the woman called out breathlessly upon boarding a Manhattan bus, moments after the news had broken. Not a word was spoken in response. But nearly every passenger reached for a BlackBerry, a cell phone, whatever device was at hand.

"People are already texting about it, putting it up on Facebook, remembering his greatest moments," noted Delmar Dualeh, sitting in the back. At 17, he confessed, the news didn't really move him emotionally. He was too young to recall the 50-year-old entertainer in his prime. But he was fully engaged in the cultural moment. He hurried the conversation along so he could get back to texting.

In Iran, people speak of a Twitter uprising. Was this the first major Twitter celebrity death? Because it wasn't just HOW lots of people first learned of Jackson's demise, but what they did once they found out.

"Once you knew the news, there wasn't so much more to know - the rest is all comment," said media critic Jeff Jarvis. So, he said, maybe you'd go to your friends instead of the news: "You might care more what your friends say than some analyst."

Jarvis himself tweeted the moment he heard of the death: He noted that Iran's spiritual leader should be grateful to Jackson because the story wiped Iran off the day's news agenda.

"That was re-tweeted a lot," Jarvis said.

The company said news of Jackson's death generated the most tweets per second since Barack Obama was elected president, and more than twice the normal tweets per second from the moment the story broke.

Plain old texting, Dualeh's choice, had its largest spike on AT&T's network in history. Nearly 65,000 texts per second were sent, the company said - more than 60 percent over normal volume.

And on Facebook, "sharing of all types went up - including wall posts, comments, notes, posted links," wrote spokeswoman Jaime Schopflin in an e-mail. "Status updates in particular saw an increase of more than three times the amount than usual."

Some posters were cynical, but many more were grief-stricken, like Jackson fan Scott Friedstein, an administrative assistant who lives in Brooklyn.

"There will never be another like him, ever," Friedstein wrote. "The word 'superstar' is tossed around a lot, but no one personified the term, lived and breathed it, and delivered like he did. To all the people who liked Michael Jackson when it wasn't cool to ... I feel for you."

Continued...

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