Joe Cocker died over the weekend, probably a bit of a shock to his family who attended his funeral more than a year ago!
Dubbed by some “Facebook Second Death Syndrome.” recycled celeb deaths are a social media, mostly Twitter and Facebook, trend that presents old news as new. Joe Cocker experienced second death over the weekend and recently Rue McClanahan departed this world for the second time having actually died five years ago; Tony Hart, of “Vision On” who died in 2009 and and Dennis Hopper in 2010 were both eulogised on social media recently.
Part of the problem is the sheer quantity of information that flows along the information superhighway, last week, Donald Trump picked his vice presidential running mate, completely untrue, and US celeb Betty White had been cured of Alzheimers Disease, she never had it in the first place.
According to sources Twitter users post around 100,000 tweets per minute, while on Facebook, close to 700,000 posts and pictures are shared in the same period. That adds up to 500,000,000 posted every single day. “30 billion pieces of Facebook content shared monthly, and more than 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube each second. That doesn't include content produced and posted by news sites, which publish thousands of articles of their own each day. And the trend is only going to accelerate in the decade ahead. From 2013 to 2020, the digital universe will grow by a factor of 10 — from 4.4 trillion gigabytes to 44 trillion.” IDC Digital Marketing 2016.
This volume of information means that it is all but impossible to judge what is right and wrong and there is a tendency to give social media more credibility than the platforms seem to deserve.
Amongst users there is a belief that information flowing from friends and organisations that the user has opted to see has to be true. People love celebrity news and drama and the two together is an irresistible draw to share that information. Being “first past the post” seems to improve the posters social standing and makes them more trustworthy in the eyes of their coterie, and aside from a potential loss of social media face there are few if any penalties associated with false posting.
If you don’t want to false post, simply Googling the celeb in question may solve your problem, www.deadoraliveinfo.com, is a compendium of live (or not) celebrities that is updated continually and is worth a visit when you hear the bad news and before you click share or retweet.
I was going to finish by quoting a Cocker lyric, but given the zombie like nature of social media, the best lyric is probably from Paul McCartney. So when it comes to Facebook, Twitter and the others “Live and let die!”
