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If this is the first time you’ve heard the sad news, I’m very sorry to break it to you. Heath Ledger died.
But if you’re under the age of 35 and are friends with people who connect with each other on the Internet, I’m guessing you knew within five hours of it happening. And when you did, you might have felt a surge of responsibility to let other people know about this handsome young actor’s unexpected death, because wow, that’s crazy, and since Heath Ledger isn’t usually in the spotlight, maybe your friends didn’t hear about it as fast as you did.
And then you probably sat back and watched the rest of the world notice it, too. Maybe you got text messages about it. It probably showed up in your RSS feed reader multiple times. Maybe you went out to get coffee, and ran into a friend at Starbucks, and the first thing out of their mouth was, “Dude, did you hear Heath Ledger died?” Conversations you overheard on the street turned into games of speculation: Closet drug addict. Being famous is a huge amount of pressure. Did a woman break his heart?
I was shaken out of the stupor when a friend of mine stepped up and called bullshit:
Seems like everyone I’ve spoken with, since ~2 pm this afternoon, has felt compelled to mention – within a couple minutes of saying hello – that Heath Ledger is dead. Likewise for the blogsphere, Twitter tweets, SMS flurries, email one-liners, … etc. I don’t want to seem crass or unsympathetic, and I actually fear coming across as such… But… WTF? … Why this buzz around Ledger among the twentysomethings passing through my day? No one seemed to notice that the bizarre chess genius Bobby Fischer is dead, for instance…
NPR’s On the Media took a stab at the question on Sunday, from a press perspective. Noting that with the advent of social media, the rumor mills turn faster than the printing presses these days, the public demand for immediate information is fierce when its interest is piqued. The Associated Press recently started writing pre-emptive obituaries for notoriously self-destructive celebrities like Britney Spears and Amy Winehouse, just so they’d be prepared for the widespread information feeding frenzy if the news of sudden death ever broke.
But Heath Ledger? Heath Ledger wasn’t on their radar for an early death. Heath Ledger caught the press completely off-guard, and so the breaking news was handled by the masses.
And as one of the masses, I raise my glass. We’ll remember you, Heath.
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