It seems that for the past week, much of our collective American consciousness has been absorbed in the death of Michael Jackson. Personally, I’m too young to have memories of him as anything other than a weirdo has-been, but, judging from many older folks’ reactions, he seems to have had a profound impact upon a great number of Americans’ lives. So, indeed, it was a sad event for many people.
What I’ve found particularly interesting about this situation, however, is how his death has brought into greater salience the deaths of minor celebrities whose passing would normally have been marked only by subcultures. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have heard of the passing of Farrah Fawcett and Billy Mays had their deaths not been clustered near MJ’s. The sociological question this raises is: how long will the MJ Grim Reaper Effect last? Will it begin fading in the next few days, or will we be hearing about celebrity deaths as front page news for weeks (distracting us from, say, an unemployment rate about to break into the double digits and the introduction of “Build America Bonds” which will suck huge amounts of domestic capital out of private markets). Also, I wonder if this effect can be spotted in the cases of other notable deaths. If it can, then perhaps a quantifiable metric of star power can be developed. The length of time it takes for celebrity death salience to return to its baseline level in this case could be deemed “1 MJ”, and the cultural influence of other notable folks can be thus compared with a fixed point. If I actually cared about the bullsh*t culture of celebrity worship, I’d probably take the time to do some number crunching.
Since I don’t, however, I wonder if a similar “MJ Effect” can be found in various other mass media phenomena. For instance, a well publicized plane crash increases the exposure of minor plane crashes that would otherwise have never made it past the local news cycle. Since it is a similar event in type, there is a window of time when people don’t put as much weight upon that particular event’s magnitude in their information discrimination. It seems like mastering this dynamic would be a powerful tool for influencing public opinion, as one could use the salience caused by a particular kind of event to raise the salience of a completely different topic by tying it to the a minor event of the initially salient type. I shall have to cast about and see if this process has already been systematized by any thinkers. If so, it might provide a systematic explanation for the types of events that emerge from day to day on the front page of Google News, as well as clarifying the orgins and spread of a host of memes.
Couple comments:
You need to consider what kind of celebrity Michael Jackson is; there are many folks who occupy their time twittering Brad Pitt and Paris Hilton, thus practicing ‘celebrity worship,’ but celebs like them can only exist because other people had paved the way. Michael was a pioneer to have such great success as a Black man during a time when racism was more pervasive than today, bringing into life a new genre of music in addition to the creation of the music video. Think John Lennon combined with MLK. Millions of people who never met him are mourning his death as if he was their brother, as you will mourn Ron Paul when he dies. You may not consider Michael’s contribution to society as intellectually fascinating as Dr. Paul’s, but Dr. King never talked about the Federal Reserve either.
Though slightly unpalatable, the metric for celebrity death you want to create could be done and applied to mournful events in general, say 9/11. I don’t believe the coat tail effect you describe is accurate because I guarantee you would have heard of Farrah dieing even if MJ hadn’t. She was a Charlie’s Angel which was extremely empowering for women (how many facebook photos do you see of girls doing the Charlie’s Angel pose?) and she has the top selling pin-up poster of all time. She was before your time, so think about if Tyra Banks died. It speaks to how influential Michael has been that he overshadowed her death so much.